It is the winter of 1993, and I am living in an apartment on Capitol Hill, in Washington DC—my first post-Baton Rouge dwelling. A massive snowstorm is barreling down on the city. True to my cultural training, I hurry to the store, buy red beans, rice, sausage, beer, and whiskey, and call my friends on the Hill to come over for a blizzard party. Most of them do, and stay all night.
But then again, they’re from Louisiana.
A few years later, I try this again in Brooklyn. Nobody comes, but this makes sense; who wants to shlep through the subway in a snowstorm? Then, one Dallas winter, I invite pals over to defy the winter storm with gumbo and Abita. I have no takers, but this too makes sense, given how dangerous it is to drive on icy north Texas roads.
And then I’m living in Philadelphia, and by now I know the drill. I only invite friends who live in my neighborhood to my gumbo-palooza, figuring that it’s no big thing to walk a few blocks through the driving snow. Everybody begs off. They just can’t figure out why incipient bad weather is an occasion for revelry.
None of them are from Louisiana. If they were, I wouldn’t have had to explain it. Because they aren’t, no explanation is possible—not even for my Dallas-born wife, who thinks my preoccupation with weather and cooking is just part of the eccentric charm that comes with marrying a guy from south Louisiana.
It is September 2011, and I am standing in my sister Ruthie’s West Feliciana kitchen. Ruthie died at home that morning from cancer. I arrive that night on a flight from Philly, and find her kitchen full of her friends, drinking, eating, laughing, crying, mourning, and rejoicing. The next few days back home are like this: tears, beers, food, funny stories, and the comradeship of the ones you love, defying the storm swirling around us all. “We’re leaning,” my widower brother-in-law said at the time, “but we’re leaning on each other.”
I am from Louisiana. I get that. And by Christmas, I got myself, my wife and kids, and my black iron pot back home for good.
Rod Dreher is a writer in St. Francisville. The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, his memoir of his late sister and small-town Louisiana, will be released on April 9 by Grand Central Publishing.
Other nominees were:
Greens Culture Mystery and Madness “Yo Mammanem” The Way We Talk
