The Sky is too Blue for Louisiana

The sky is too blue for Louisiana this October. A huge clump of elephant ears is starting to overtake my bright yellow front door. My spindly little bougainvillea in their hanging baskets are trying to please - putting out more spindly shoots and a few tiny pink blooms. Poor little dears. They do not know that looming ahead is a thing called Frost.

The perfect blue skies are making me insanely restless.

I just want to be on a beach again, consuming plantains and a whole fish, with a mangy dog hovering in the background to clean up the bones. A man selling strange looking bracelets or coconuts trying in vain to get my attention. Another one in an ancient wooden boat trying to convince me to join him for an impromptu snorkeling trip. Music blaring from the speakers, but not quite loud enough to drown out the even sweeter ocean music. Feeling in my soul that absolutely everyone around me is completely calm and relaxed, totally focused on enjoying this day at the beach.

I want to wake up one morning and hear that work is canceled. There's a strike, nothing too dangerous, but a lot of tires burning and no way around the roadblocks. That means it's the perfect morning for hot chocolate with bread from the little store next door. Followed by singing for awhile on the couch. And after a few phone calls, all the lawn chairs and stray five gallon buckets in my little yard are occupied by The Brotherhood, who are also all off work for the day. I marvel how these men grew up together and still sit for hours at a time, multiple times a week, and shoot the breeze. I'm pretty sure I stopped doing what they're doing about the time I got out of school at age 14. At the end of the day, we're alone again, and the solar lights on the porch come one. A quick moto run through the back streets, and we have fried pork and plantains. I have become good at spotting the chunks of liver, and giving them to my husband. "Best part," he says. There is Coca-Cola to drink. It is in a cold glass bottle, and it is not made with corn syrup.

I want to go to church on the back of a motorcycle again. I want to arrive fifteen minutes late and wait in the benches for another fifteen before opening song. It is quiet and breezy in that little concrete church, and no one is ever really concerned about the time.

I think this quiet rebellion took root in my heart in August, when we got to take a little trip south of the border to see family in Monterrey. We ate carne asada grilled in a wheelbarrow full of coals and again drank Coca-Cola with no corn syrup. In the evenings, the neighbors sat in the streets and had lively conversation, and never turned off their music all night long. I slept so very well.

It seems like in USA there is always somewhere to be, and you always have to be on time. We spend so much time doing responsible things, like going to the doctor or getting our teeth cleaned, where kind people in sensible scrubs carefully follow correct protocol, record everything in their laptops, and send large bills to our insurance. They look at us sympathetically if the H***i country is mentioned and ask if it's as really as bad as they say on the news.

The usher holds the door open for us respectfully when we are three minutes late to church, smiling kindly as if to say, "Bless your dear scatterbrained hearts. You're trying." Inside, everyone is nicely dressed in not too bright colors and black shoes. The church is always the same temperature. No need for fans or sweat rags. We join in the singing, not too loud, not too quiet, and the man running the mike adjusts the sound system just so.

I let my girl run around with her hair in an afro this weekend. I let bright yellow cosmos take over every spare inch of my garden and bright velvet throw pillows from Temu take over my couches. My Haitian family brought me four bright turquoise lawn chairs for my birthday. We have a fire ring in front of them, and we use it. These are the ways that I quietly rebel, yet I know my Haitian family still sees me as the strict, uptight white girl. And living in America, the land of opportunity, what other option do you have?

The holidays are coming, kalunk kalunk, and with them a new baby. And I'm not researching baby products nor have I yet bought a single onesie. What am I waiting for? We can't seem to decide on a name and I wonder what people would think if instead of sending out a cute little announcement hours after the birth, we brought our baby to church the first Sunday and said we didn't have her named quite yet. Is that even legal in USA? It used to drive me crazy living in Haiti when no one could tell me what the new baby's name was, but now it almost seems like a reasonable course of action to just wait until you meet the child and surely inspiration will strike.

And now, I must go. The sky is too blue. There is only a month left before the frost. Ava and I will go on a long bike ride and admire the black eyed susans. But first, like a responsible white girl, I will start my dishwasher and a load of laundry.