I am on the road again. Traveling away from Louisiana. A few hundred miles across a state line and the horizon in front of me seems like another reality. I imagine in a way , that’s true.
We seem to lose sight of what is important in the world when things are not right in front of us.

I visited Grande Isle, on the coast before leaving Louisiana. Grande Isle was a resort destination at the turn of the last century. A landscape that Kate Chopin wrote of in her novel “The Awakening.” It’s beauty must have been significant – it must have been full of grace. Today it is crowded with cheaply built beach homes. The grace is gone. Grande Isle is recently remembered by most because it was the primary beach that the oil spill from the Deep Horizon disaster washed up on. The oil is now buried under the sand. Upon the sand are the things that mark the island’s condition and abuse. Shells mixed with plastic debris. The loss of birds to the oil pollution still obvious.

I remember Grande Isle on this day, and on the days to come when I return to my home in the Northern Rockies.
As much as I look forward to going home, I will long for another day on the marsh, another day full of the scent of magnolia, jasmine and gardenia filling the streets of Spanish Town.