More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The heat hits me like a ball of lead. In upstate New York, where we usually live, the summer sun gets hot, but the shade stays cool. Here, the sun is liquid heat, even in the shade, and the air is like soup. I swing my arm through it, and feel moisture clinging to my skin.
We’re staying in the French Quarter, where the streets have names like Bourbon and Royal, where the blocks are short and squat, and wrought-iron balconies run like ivy along the front of every building. It’s a collision of color, and style, and sound. Cobblestones and concrete, twisting trees and Spanish moss. I have never been somewhere so full of contradictions.
At Café du Monde, the air tastes like sugar. The café sits at the edge of Jackson Square: a giant courtyard full of people—tourists, but also performers. A woman stands on an upturned bucket, painted head to toe in silver. She’s dressed like a dancer, but she doesn’t move until someone drops a coin into her palm. A man plays a saxophone in the shade, and the sound of a trumpet rises from the other side of the square. The two melodies sound like they’re talking.
The restaurant looks like half the buildings in the Quarter—two stories tall, with iron rails and massive white-framed windows.
She said the best way to find yourself was to let yourself get lost.
