an hour spent walking the dog...

I step outside to a crescent moon and a scattering of bright stars against a deep indigo sky. Walking down my street, I pass houses a century old, some barely holding back against the years with their rotted gutters and uneven balconies, others brought back to the lustre of their younger days... apartments for rent for a couple hundred dollars, others a couple thousand.

Reaching St Charles Avenue, I pass a nightclub, seemingly out of place, a strange building supposedly built from disgarded parts of the Eiffel Tower. It's just beginning to fill with young noisy people, bass thumps out each time the door opens, strobe lights flash through the windows high above the street.

Turning on the Avenue, I pass hotels, some old and grand, others new and overly bright and shiny. Then there are restaurants and bars, people sitting drinking chatting loudly and happily at wrought iron tables right at the edge of the street.

Streetcars rumble down the neutral ground in both directions, adding a distinctive burnt scent to the damp night air. I see the occassional cute face staring out a window and wonder who they are, where they're going.

After a few blocks, I turn back into the Garden District. Immediately, the houses grow large and bold. I walk down brick sidewalks, careful to watch my step as many a brick is long gone and roots of trees protrude in the spaces between others.

There are fences all along the street. Wrought iron with finials of all shapes and sizes.. fleur de lis, spikes, cones; white picket wood; chicken wire and large concrete walls with foreboding metal doors.

The air is full of the sickly sweet funereal smell of lugustrum blooms. Soon this will fade, replaced by the sickly sweet smell of magnolia blossoms. Plants are everywhere and are of every type. Large stately oak and magnolia trees, hibiscus, palms, banana trees, lantana, roses, irises. They reach up and out and over everywhere, through the fences, up trellises. Once I'm not looking the right direction and a rose branch snaking its way through a wrought iron fence digs into my neck and my dog drags me onward, the thorn digging through my skin until it releases pulled back to the branch.

I reach Magazine Street and turn again. The mansions grow fewer. I pass a dilipadated funeral home, a Western Union office with cracked plate glass windows, faded carpet behind them. The next block turns into shops and stores of varying wares. Behind large glass windows meshed in steel coverings is pottery, paintings, fossils, flowers, chairs that came from faraway countries decades past. I pass the plastic tables outside Juans Flying Burrito, more drunk happy people cheeks flushed sipping on margaritas.

Back into my neighborhood, more of the strange mixture of gentrification and dilipation.

Home.

God, I love New Orleans...