Tender Flower

As any warm-blooded creature living in Louisiana has certainly observed, the weather’s hardly been tropical lately. 

Those who, like me, live in old houses will have noticed this keenly, because old houses built in the semitropical South prior to the arrival of air-conditioning were cleverly designed to lose heat as efficiently as possible. Our house is excellent at losing heat. In fact, during summers past, when one hurricane or another knocked out the power for an extended period, the house, with its high ceilings, screened porches, and tall, double-hung windows, remained pretty comfortable through all but the hottest weather. 

In mid-January, though, when the temperature fell to fifteen degrees and the wind came straight out of Winnipeg, comfortable it was not. While the power was on, no number of fossil fuel-driven heating appliances could raise the indoor temperature above fifty degrees. And when the electricity went out—which it did with great finality on the coldest night of all, leaving just two wood-burning fireplaces standing between us and the arctic blast—we were dealt a stark reminder of just how tough my wife’s great-grandparents must have been. 

They were certainly tougher than my wife, a tender flower who loathes cold weather, and who has been leaning hard into her “eccentric plant lady” identity since our youngest child left for college last August. As the polar vortex descended, my tender flower set out to rescue scores of the even tenderer, tropical plants that she spends all year nurturing in our garden—stepping into the cold snap wearing enough clothes to resemble a Russian nesting doll. 

In the days leading up to the hard freeze, into the house came ferns, hip gardenias, gingers, trays of tender perennials—Lamb’s Ears and Dusty Miller; and potted Night-Blooming Cereus by the dozen. Now that it’s gotten really cold, so much tropical flora has been relocated into the house that it’s begun to resemble Max’s bedroom in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the ceiling hung with vines and the walls become the world all around. To tell the truth, I rather like the effect. Although perhaps not as much as our dogs, whose usual “outside dog” status has been temporarily suspended for humanitarian reasons, as well as because, as mammals, they give off heat and therefore might as well be doing so indoors. Jockeying for position on the floor in front of the fire, they can’t quite believe their luck. Never has the origin of the phrase “three-dog-night” required less explanation. 

Of course, this being Louisiana, it won’t stay cold for long. Pretty soon the season will tilt back towards the heat and humidity for which this old house was built, and which have shaped so much about the way the architecture, the cuisine, and the music of this place have evolved. Until it does, we present Country Roads’ annual “Music Issue” for your winter reading pleasure. In it we trace the complicated evolution of jazz, swamp blues, and Louisiana French music; profile musical pioneers present and passed; and share tales of music festivals gone wrong, a Mississippi Delta town doing it right, and the vast project to build a museum capable of encompassing it all. Our goal with this annual special issue is to deliver the inspiration to better appreciate Louisiana’s wealth of home-grown musical genres, a guide to where to hear them at their best, and a primer for the musical bonanza that spring festival season has in store. Read on, and once the weather is warm enough for all these tender flowers, dogs, and people to go outside again, keep a copy close, because February’s Calendar of Events also brings enough Mardi Gras season shenanigans to warm the cockles of the coldest heart. (And hey, if it does stay cold, you could always use the pages to start a fire.) Happy Mardi Gras.