Beyond Bourbon Street: My New Orleans Love Affair

Travel can be like dating: A new city might be a one-night affair, worth a heady fling but appearing less attractive in the morning. Or it might be a love connection that lasts months or even years. Then there are those cities that may not be a forever match, but get under your skin nonetheless, seizing a bit of your soul. The ones you can’t quite seem to shake no matter how long it’s been. That’s what New Orleans is to me.

Maybe it’s the sultry showers that spring up to break the swampy humidity, or the crumbling cemeteries that whisper stories in their unearthly beauty. The candy-colored shotgun homes and the grander Garden District manses, the rumbling of the St. Charles streetcar, the ghosts of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner. The chargrilled oysters dripping with garlic and butter, the thick po-boys stuffed with shrimp, the fluffy beignets covered by an avalanche of powdered sugar. The glee I feel when brazenly drinking an Abita on the street, feeling somehow surreptitious despite the mind-boggling legality of New Orleans drinking laws. The jazz be-bop-bubbling up in the buzzing bars on Frenchmen Street. The glorious gumbo of Creole, Cajun, and black history in a city that has seen so much heartache but resolutely rises up to battle on.

Yes, I know what it means to miss New Orleans.