strike that

delta blues

I’m in an airport, and I’m leaving New Orleans.

This morning I drew a brown pelican. I drew it big, with a black Sharpie marker, on a mural outside of a preschool. I’ve never drawn a pelican before and it wasn’t very good; I couldn’t get the long sinuous curve of the neck from my perch on the step ladder. My pelican was stocky. But whatever. There’s a pelican where there wasn’t one.

My friend Jon taught me a lesson a long time ago, back when he was an Americorps before anyone had ever heard of Americorps, when he was planting gardens in Camden New Jersey. Sometimes people would ask him what he was doing there, in a neighborhood that wasn’t his. And he would say, Someone needs to be here. Someone needs to be planting gardens, and no one was.

And sometimes I have wondered what I have been doing in this city. I’ve been to New Orleans exactly twice before this trip, and I have one memory from each visit. When I was seven I came with my parents and they let me pick out a pink and blue ceramic mask of comedy and tragedy. When I was twenty one I stopped here on a road trip with my then-boyfriend Mark Sloan, and we spent the night outside the city in a tent with mesh too large to keep out mosquitoes. That’s my connection to New Orleans.

Some of the Hands On volunteers have long and deep relationships with the city. Stasha visits every year on her vacation. Amy and Ben honeymooned here. But most of us simply felt compelled to come. Rick lives in Houston and took a long weekend to help out. Jess explains that God put a love for the people of New Orleans on her heart. If I thought of God that way, that’s how I might explain it too. But I don’t.

And now I’m headed to Portland. Many of my friends live there, and I’ve been fantasizing about the city for several years. The fantasy goes something like this: Portland has the excitement of the city life I loved on the east coast, with the friendliness and intentional living I have come to value in the Northwest. Also there is a big river, and people who own tents, and places to get a coffee after six at night.

For now, though, I’m just here in the airport. For now my feet are still in New Orleans, and my thoughts haven’t shot ahead yet either. For now I’d like to call Nathan on the phone, Nathan who brought me to the airport in the middle of a workday, (Nathan who pulls the car over on the side of the highway when there’s something cool to photograph,) and say Nathan, come back for me. Because there’s work here to do, and I know how to do it.

The only thing stopping me is my new housemate Jamey, whom I have never once met, who has borrowed a car in order to pick me up at PDX. I don’t know why I am so blessed to have a life full of people who pick me up and drop me off at airports when all I seem to do is fly around. But for now I’m just trying to trust that, and I’ll figure out the rest when I land.

posted by tortaluga @ 3:07 PM