A Snowball's Chance

I lived a few places in New Orleans.

The last place I lived was in a Pepto-Bismol pink house with fuchsia trim.

What the house looked like when I was there.  The papaya tree was just a little stick that took over the front of the house in about four months.  

It was a duplex of shotgun houses, the other unit having access to the upstairs.  I only had a "closet" halfway through the house that was actually a stairway to nowhere.

The bathroom sloped down in the back, as it obviously use to be the back porch, and I was always convinced that the concrete backyard had a latrine buried underneath.

The bathroom consisted of a bath and a toilet.  No shower, and no sink.  The toilet rocked back and forth when anyone sat on it, and it leaked a little bit of water onto the floor.  It was also where the banana slugs came in.

I had a phobia of the toilet. I was convinced that the boards underneath were rotted through, and eventually, I would fall, pants around my ankles, and get stuck in the crawl space with the rats and spiders, bleeding and covered with sewerage.

The only sink in the house shared a wall with the bathroom and had a metal bowl about the size of a thimble. Sometimes sewer gas would come up.

The house had hornets in the siding that would sometimes make it through the quarter inch drywall, the windows had to be held up with blocks, the air conditioners would freeze up on a regular basis, and the floor would always leave a gray soot on the bottom of my feet no matter how much I cleaned.

It also had fourteen foot ceilings, was easy walking distance to almost everywhere I wanted to go, and I loved it, even with the super-gay neighbor who was a parody of himself.

He put grape-vine lights and a light up palm tree in the back "yard".  He also had a tiny little fluff of a dog he named Precious.  I never told him that the name reminded me of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, and maybe the serial killer Jame Gumb from The Silence of the Lambs, even after he nixed my idea of putting up pink flamingos because they were "too tacky".  He kinda reminded me of both.

After I moved out, the landlord painted the house and cut down my papaya tree.

Up close, it looks like they just painted the whole thing white and the old color shows through.  We walked by on our way to the Bywater BBQ for brunch and bloody marys on Sunday

The first place I lived in New Orleans was in Mid City.

I had moved with my sister and our friend Ben, and we were so close to the park, we were lucky we didn't get eaten by nutria.

We lived in a little brick house that looked nothing like the pretty houses nearby.  Our house looked like it should be in a suburb in Anywhere, USA.  But it was super-duper cheap, and the laundromat down the street was right next to the snowball place.

Chris and Kami and I decided we had to have a snowball.  No excuses this time.  And it had to have condensed milk on the bottom, in the middle, and on top.

We went here:

It isn't really that it's so popular.  It just looks that way because it takes 45 minutes to get served.

I forgot how much you have to wait for... pretty much everything in New Orleans.

And yes, it actually is worth the wait.

After about 20 minutes, we were too invested to leave, and once we ordered,we were committed.

I mean, seriously.  Good stuff.

By the time we got them, we were hot, sweaty, thirsty, and tired.  The snowballs lasted almost the full five minutes it took to go to City Park.

The snowballs didn't even make it to the park.  

 City Park is cleaner than I remembered, even before Katrina.  And busier.  But there were still plenty of quiet spots underneath the oak trees.

I love City Park.

We were just relaxing, taking pictures, walking about...

I realized I really really missed living here.

And then I saw this:

Damn faces are following me.