Dwelling Place

Walking up to church one Sunday this past December, I was amused to find a remnant of the preceding night’s downtown festivities—a single section of city-owned barricade, used for our Mardi Gras and Christmas Parades. Standing solitarily, the forgotten barricade's singleness was peculiar, and in the light of day so obvious, but it remained merely as an oversight in the chaos of parade cleanup. Some city employee would come for it Monday morning, and the minor mistake would soon be forgotten. My 7-year-old ran right up to it, pretending to climb it like he had at the parade. This time, though, instead of reaching from the sidewalk over the barricade into the street for goodies, he faced the church with his arms outstretched. Yes, my boy, the good stuff is on that side, I thought and smiled. The image of him blocked from the church and reaching for it from the curb struck me with a metaphor that resonated in the busy days that barreled into Christmas. Yet again, there ...

This week marks ten years since the Deep Water Horizon oil spill washed onto Gulf Coast shores. In the days preceding its landfall, we smelled oily fumes in the heavy air of anxiousness and dread, a looming, unstoppable enemy of our environment and the economics of our area at the height of the tourist season. Authorities, unified against a common foe, planned and prepared, and coastal citizens waited. I stood on the beaches the day the first oil flats broke apart in the waves, watching skimmer boats attempt to remove flats of thick, foamy petroleum from the surface of the water, and mourning the loss of our beautiful beaches. Little did I know another disaster was quietly lurking, one my family was not at all prepared for. The next morning, my husband departed for work, kissing the back of my neck as I stood at the stove in my pjs cooking a hot breakfast for my two toddlers, the summer mornings a contrast to our busy school year ones. The pain struck quickly, low, and sh...