the juices.
Zydeco music plays from the speakers in public parks on all the holidays, everyone dances a lot and you can buy alligator-meat-on-a-stick at the street fairs. You can carry alcohol in your car as long as it’s in plain sight, and there are drive-through daiquiri bars all over town.
We lived in Louisiana for four years. It was an adventure sometimes, and for us transplanted Northerners, it took some getting used to on many levels: the heat… the bugs… the mold… the fire ants… the heat… the pronunciation of French surnames… the food… the heat.
Would you like it if I went into greater detail on a few of these topics, if you ever decide to move there yourself, or visit someday? Hey, you never know, some of this stuff could come in handy. We will start with the heat…
SOUTHERN HEAT
South Louisiana has the two distinct seasons, Hot and Not As Hot.
Summertime is a literal steam bath. I learned to buy nothing but cotton and linen clothing, and stopped wearing underpants except for the, oh, about six to eight weeks it was a little less humid down there. Absolutely no pun intended, but it was funny how that came out, wasn’t it?
I am sure Louisiana natives wore underpants, only I was a transplanted Northerner who didn’t see any sense in wearing sweaty undergarments that stuck to me, making my outer clothes all sweaty and wet in return. So off they came. The undergarments, not my The humidity is so intense, you can walk outside and get wet, whether it is raining or not. My unofficial name for Louisiana was The Crotch Rot State.
MOLD
All that talk about damp panties leads us to the topic of mold. Mold is everywhere, nearly all the time. There is black mold and green mold and sometimes a lovely patterned combination of the two, all shiny and slippery.
Boy, is it slippery, and it creates big, slick, greeny-black areas where the endless damp and heat combine to make places where a person can easily slip and fall down, like I used to do all the time, until I learned to step around the damned stuff. The North has ice that you slip and fall on, but the Deep South has mold.
It’s on the buildings, on the trees, it’s on anything you leave outside longer than a day. Clothes left outside grow mold. Lawn cushions, baskets, sneakers, and paperbacks you forgot to bring inside because you were silly enough to try and read outdoors. If you sat out in all that humidity long enough, you’d probably grow mold, too.
GUNS AND WEAPONS
Guns n’ weapons are a fact of life, for both sexes, down South. Most kids, by the age of eight, owned some sort of gun or knew how to shoot one. My very sweet, genteel neighbor lady was all thrilled when her husband bought her a new gun one Christmas. I tried to look impressed when she showed it to me, but all I could think of was, she wears flowery dresses or floaty skirts all the time, served me tea from an expensive antique silver tea set, and yet was gushy about a big ole She was less gushy a week later, because her husband had loaded the gun one night as they were sitting on the bed, was fiddling with it and somehow shot a hole clear through the mattress and box spring and into the floor.
Not only had he ab-suh-loot-lee her bed linen, she informed me, but she had wanted to be the one to shoot it fuhstaftah awl, it was gun.
Yeah, sure, I understand completely.
MOSQUITOES AND LIZARDS
Mosquitoes are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, except for the week of Christmas. Kidding, they’re gone by about November 30th and don’t come back for a month or so. The lizards eat the mosquitoes, the moths, and lots of other icky insectoid critters, so if you are down South and see lizards on your window screens, in your car, or skittering around in your house, be very happy they are there and please do not squash them.
IF YOUR VEHICLE BREAKS DOWN
If you are stranded on the road with a broken vehicle and lots of other cars or trucks pull up and guys hop out and offer to help you, don’t panic. This is the South. Guys will scrunch under your car (even if it’s raining) or lift the hood and tinker with the engine until your vehicle starts. And if it’s not fixable, everyone down South has a truck or knows someone who owns a truck and they will haul your vehicle to a garage for you. Then invite you over for dinner.
ATTACK OF LA CUCARACHA
Which translated, means attack of the cockroach, but they don’t really attack, they just sort of lay (or is it lie?) in wait. If you move down South, you need to face the fact that a lot of bugs live there, indoors and outdoors. We had bugs up North, but most types of bugs I was accustomed to seeing back home, had startlingly larger cousins down South.
Worms are bigger, moths are huge, and the roaches (called tree roaches in Louisiana) can I have never researched to see if non-Southern roaches fly. I am sure they might, I just don’t care to know, since I discovered Louisiana tree roaches can and do fly. All over.
Like at you, or into your hair. And why they are called tree roaches make no sense, since they are not just in trees, but everywhere.
In your closet, as you reach for that pair of shoes… under the kitchen sink, as you reach for the can of cleanser… in the bathroom, right at the bottom of the basket you just took that fluffy towel out of… big, long, antennae waving Everywhere Roaches.
They are so big, they don’t even scuttle away at the sight of a human like the occasional Northern roaches I had seen. No, they do things like calmly walk out from under your bed as you are standing by it in your bare feet.
Perhaps you had just woken up, and were staring out the big picture window at the muddy water (we lived on the bayou, which is Louisiana waterfront, but it’s just non-moving muddy water) wondering if that was a snake you just saw slither across the surface of the water, when your peripheral vision detects a slight movement…
You look down to see what it could be…and then your body to safety in the middle of the bed and scream as loudly as you can for Husband to “Husband is a big, tall guy, but he happens to hate roaches, especially roaches. Too bad.
You’re more of a match for it, honey, my heart rate is still over 200, do battle with it. If I try to kill it in my present state, it will probably just laugh and then call all its friends to come on over and party.
I learned to keep a supply of clear plastic drinking glasses handy, that the kids were forbidden to drink from. If Husband was at work, you could recruit one of the teenagers to pop a glass over a roach if you found one. Trap it and then call Husband on the phone to say, “This one is can you get over here and get it out of the house?”
If he couldn’t make it home right away, you then put something heavy on top of the glass, so the roach couldn’t perhaps knock it over and escape, probably on a path right for you. Two big books work well for this. You carefully keep a secure area around the glass until Husband gets home, looks at the Roach Under Glass and announces for the hundredth time he big bugs and why does have to be the one to take it outside?
If you ever move down South with a bug loathing Husband who whines about these things, keep a supply of those cardboard rectangles that come in new shirts and stuff. They’re good for sliding under the glass and trapping the roach in there, so you can then carry it outdoors without ever having to touch it. You then just the entire thing over the deck railing to the lawn below and run back into the house. The lawn guy will eventually bring the glass back and set it on the deck.
In the absence
