2021.04.01
letter home viii
hello friends,
it’s April and a cold front has swept into New Orleans, displacing for a brief moment the march towards a sweltering summer. the ancient oaks have begun to hang heavy with the spring growth and we have planted a small garden, jasmine and hollyhock and catnip. the garden is an flag on verdant moon, planted and left in memoriam, for we do not expect to be here to see more than the first burst of neon green growth.
a horizon of normalcy or something new is visible, and we are carried towards it on an mRNA steed. the storm of unreality that was coronavirus now feels ready to break. that inflicted, claustrophobic slowness now threatens to accelerate, throwing us into the future at speed we now feel unaccustomed to.
Manon and I have lived in many cities over the last 30 months (Oakland, Los Angeles, Turin, Budapest, New Orleans) and we now face the task of finding where next we will call home. until recently a plan existed, one certainty we clung to, a torch against the dark. that torch has flickered and gone out, and so we are flung, unmoored in spacetime, towards something entirely new.
which is all to say that things are good. we are halfway vaccinated and relish the concept of tossing even the tiniest fraction of caution to the wind in our New Orleans life that has been free of revelry, street car rides, and the ability to become comfortably anonymous in a crowd. our living space is ever more filled with objects of clay and wood, a sign of our continuous efforts to find some small stillness in making. Manon continues on her journey of baking for the finest pie shop in the city (this is not hyperbole), and I continue to resist the temptation to eat nothing but chicken pot pie forever.
it’s true, we do face some coming changes. either driven out of town by the unbelievable heat of summer or driven on by our need to see what’s next, we expect to be living somewhere new come autumn. we hope that our journey out of the swamp brings us closer to all of you and that we may, finally, embrace and be together, if only for a moment.
I cannot conceive of something I want more.
with love,
sam