Hurricane Housing

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A recent addition to my LJ flist posted information about MoveOn's Hurricane Housing website. As my OD friend seems to be okay for now, we've posted our guest room as an offering. Their blurb is quoted below:

I'm sure you've seen the horrifying images on TV of destruction left by Hurricane Katrina, and the many, many people left with nowhere to go.

You can help. MoveOn.org just launched a website, www.hurricanehousing.org, to connect your empty beds with hurricane victims who desperately need a place to wait out the storm.

You can post your offer of housing (a spare room, extra bed, even a decent couch) on www.HurricaneHousing.org or search there for housing if you need it.

MoveOn will pass requests from hurricane victims or relief agencies on to volunteer hosts, who can decide whether or not to respond to a particular request. The host remains anonymous until they reply to someone looking for housing.

I just posted my own offer. I hope you will too, or pass this on to people you know in the Southeast:

www.HurricaneHousing.org

Housing is most urgently needed within reasonable driving distance (about 300 miles) of the affected areas, especially New Orleans.

Permalink at MissMeliss.com

Do You Know What It Means?

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Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
And miss it each night and day
I know I'm not wrong, the feeling's getting stronger
The longer I stay away

Miss the moss-covered vines, tall sugar pines
Where mockingbirds used to sing
I'd love to see that old lazy Mississippi
Hurrying into Spring1

I've never actually been to New Orleans except in my imagination. I've read books like crazy that take place there – Anne Rice's books, of course – but the work of others, as well. If it's possible to long for a place you've never been, to feel like a city you've only seen in books and movies is somehow home, well, the city of jazz and zydeco has called to me for as long as I can remember.

It's the music that does it. Jazz isn't always the kickiest of styles, but it speaks directly to my soul with an honesty and a kind of nakedness that other music doesn't seem to offer, at least, not with visceral poignance. Jazz and blues, with their tendency toward improvisation, and their brutally emotional lyrics, get me through the darkest hours of my life. It's hard to remain sad when Billie Holiday or Louis Armstrong, or even Harry Connick, Jr., are crooning about wine and relationships.

Zydeco is a much more recent ship on my musical horizon, but like it's older brothers, it's deeply rooted in story. I think that's why I like all three forms of music. They're not just empty words, they're oral history, and perfect scenes. You can taste the flavor of the region in every stanza.

The moonlight on the bayou
A Creole tune that fills the air
I dream about magnolias in bloom
And I'm wishin I was there2>

Everything I've ever read about New Orleans talks about the light in certain parts of the city as being sort of greenish grey. If you've never lived in an old neighborhood, the kind where the trees are ancient, and the houses are all slightly different from one another, and there's a leafy canopy over the center of the road, you might never have seen that kind of light. You get it, sometimes, in places like the Rosegarden District in San Jose, CA, on overcast days. It's a soft light that lends a misty patina to everything it touches, and walking in it is not unlike being steeped in sepia and posing in a picture.

On days when the light was like that, I'd walk into a favorite cafe, and sip a mocha, and read a thick novel, spending hours inside myself. I always wanted to experience the real thing. I hope that when the levees are rebuilt and the city is drained, there's some of that left.

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
When that's where you left your heart
And there's one thing more, I miss the one I care for
More than I miss New Orleans3

I wrote, several months ago, that the ideal way to spend my 35th birthday was to sip cafe au lait and eat beignets at Cafe Du Monde, but I let myself be talked out of it. “The weather will suck,” they said. “Wait til fall, when it's nicer.” So I waited, and I shouldn't have.

I've been glued to CNN for the past few days, watching the damage from Katrina mounting, watching water pour into New Orleans. My thoughts are with the people of Lousiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, of course, but a piece of my heart cries for the city of New Orleans as well.

Way down yonder in New Orleans
In the land of the dreamy scenes
There's a garden of Eden…you know what I mean4

Amy of BeautyJoyFood has asked all her blogbuddies to write about New Orleans in some fashion, and post the link you see at the top of the entry. So this entry is at her behest, but it's dedicated to two amazing women from OpenDiary: RebelBelle, who is safe at home, but soggy, in Alabama, and Cobalt, who is one of the many evacuees from New Orleans.

1, 2, & 3) “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?,” by Louis Alter and Eddie DeLange.
4) “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” by Henry Creamer and J. Turner Layton.

Permalink at MissMeliss.com

Input Requested

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Imagine you were using the web to find good deals on cars. The site you've chosen has all the requisite feeds highlighting cool cars, and new cars, and all that, but they also have original content.

What are the top five things you'd like to see on such a site, article-wise?

Your answer may help me in a writing gig I've been offered.

Permalink at MissMeliss.com

Peachy

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Temperatures today are supposed to reach the mid-to-high 90's, and what am I contemplating? Not sunning by the pool, not splashing IN the pool, and not any of a thousand and one activities involving the creative use of ice cubes.

I am contemplating peach cobbler.
Specifically, I am contemplating BAKING peach cobbler.

I blame this fluffy mystery I'm reading, The Peach Cobbler Murders, (or something like that) one of those mysteries with recipes included. The writing isn't great and the plot is taking FOREVER to move forward, but oh my god, the baked goods.

Books like this should come with a basket of tasty treats, one per chapter.

It's probably a good thing I have no peaches, at the moment.
Although tomorrow is grocery day…

(I have just remembered that there is a bag of frozen strawberries in the freezer. I have no idea where they came from. Is there such a thing as strawberry cobbler?)

Permalink at MissMeliss.com

Irony

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While the people of Louisiana, with which we share a border, scurry and scramble to protect themselves from Katrina's forceful arrival, I am sitting on my bed, with my laptop propped on two pillows, watching lightning arc across the night sky.

Earlier, I stepped outside to supervise the dogs pre-bed elimination break and rain fell in soft droplets that fell like soft kisses on my bare shoulders. I let the breeze caress my hair, and lifted my face, smiling into the flickering light turning the grey clouds briefly lavender.

My voice was laughing, while my head considered the irony.

Permalink at MissMeliss.com

A Garden in Paris

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A Garden In Paris

Stephanie Grace Whitson

I have to be honest. If I'd realized at the library that this book was marked as Christian fiction, I wouldn't have taken it home, because I find most overtly Christian fiction to be smarmy and insincere and I dislike being preached at.

This is a case, though, where that would have meant missing a great novel, a fictional travelogue about a woman who returns to Paris, where she'd been a foreign exchange student as a young girl, after losing her husband, and rediscovers not only romance, but her pre-marital adventuresome self.

Yes, there's relationship angst between the main character and her daughter, but there's also music, and dashing French men, and cute cafes.

And yes, there is talk of god and religion, but it's organic, and true to the characters, and didn't strike me as being preachy or smarmy at all.

I'm not sure I'm willing to read the sequel, but I quite enjoyed this book.

Permalink at Zenitopia.com