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this town is shrinking.

i don’t think it’s reverse counterflow from katrina, either. that ship has already sailed, docked, dropped anchor, and grown barnacles. this town is shrinking more immediately.

the season’s are coming back around. when i got here in august, it was hot so hot. hot until the hurricane and then hot again for a good while longer. then the brief fall and a winter so real it snowed.

in the last few weeks, little scrubby bushes that don’t impress much most of the year have lost their minds and became big pink white red purple blankets of lust for life. i even reminded myself that while i’m here, alive, driving around louisiana, i should take notice of the spring foliage in between thinking about work and money and the rest of it.

i still am not 100% confident that i can get from one side of town to the other if navigating the lake is involved, but i’m trying to be more content with getting lost when it inevitably happens. the flowers help with this, too. while lost, like i was briefly this afternoon trying to take the back way to the golf course/dog park/tennis park/art gallery, i just pretend i’m there to look at the flowers. it’s so easy to trick me sometimes. i must be really gullible.

but the spring flowers will give way to the summer heat and the music festivals and the afternoon showers and increased mowing schedules, and one of these days not long from now i will have seen what one seasonal rotation looks like in these parts.

and all the unknown faces on the faculty board start to have stories attached to them, and you realize that you’re just telling the same old story in a not so new place listening to stories turn into the same old mistakes and accidents and explosions and not so mysterious mysteries.

and talk turns to another dozen or so potential story tellers that will (depression permitting) ride writing into this shrunken river town next fall, but you can’t help but wonder why there won’t be any carpenters or taxi drivers or chemists or stroke victims or professional jugglers or prize fighters or preachers or senators or revolutionaries amongst them.

and the sun sets a little later on a night so warm the dog sleeps under the bed and not on it and you think about lightening and shelter and wrong trees and yesterday and bad dreams and leaving.

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