Charleston, South Carolina and Litchfield Beach

This blog is almost always centered on New Orleans, but I left my beloved city for a week and we traveled with my niece to another city full of old manor homes, horse-drawn carriages and Civil War history – Charleston, South Carolina. Like NOLA, there was a large City Market. Our French Market may have more food but theirs went on forever and was often air conditioned. Charleston has its own French Quarter and even serves shrimp & grits at many of their local restaurants.

Why Football Matters Vol. 2

The city of New Orleans is debating whether to move Halloween to make way for the Saints game that Sunday. Beyond figuring out how to watch a game and trick-or-treat at the same time, we’d never figure out how to wear our Saints’ gear and a costume at once.

Silly? Maybe. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my country, about how divided we’ve let ourselves become over everything from red and blue states to which creature to like in the Twilight series. Maybe a city willing to move what’s become a children’s holiday to make way for a football game seems backward somehow, but this city understands something that the country seems to have forgotten – united we stand, divided, we fall.

Oil – How I Comfort Myself

I don’t know how others deal with the anger, frustration and dismay involved in watching our government allow a foreign company to dump millions and millions of gallons into the Gulf, but I have a few tricks.

One is that I remind myself of the indomitable spirit of this region. We can all remember seeing the reconstruction taking place after Katrina like it was yesterday… because it WAS yesterday. But, long ago, this region faced a far more devastating blow, the Civil War.