No one in the South calls it autumn. At least not my south. Fall? Sure. But autumn is reserved for Vermont or something north of the Mason Dixon line, a line I was brought up believing had to be just north of Atlanta. Maryland. It's in fucking Maryland.
Leaves change in autumn. I mean they change during the fall in Louisiana but no one waxes poetic about nature putting on a show. One day it's less than 90 degrees in October and then there's one week where it threatens to be 50 degrees. Then all the leaves fall off and then it's 90 again and you have to pick all the leaves up.
This is our truth.
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This all comes to mind in March, obviously. The tail end of a month that can be 30 or 85 degrees. Each warm spell the “shots across the bow” from May, when the oppression officially starts. The humidity that never really left, suddenly amplified by the increase in temperature, reminding you it’s still here. The humidity the reason why 40 in Louisiana cuts you to your core. I once went to Idaho in the winter, 20 degrees there feels crisp. 20 degrees in Louisiana makes you wish you were dead.
The good news about Louisiana weather is there are exactly 4 perfect days a year. You should be grateful for these, and I’d say we are, but we get so drunk and sunburned we tend to ruin these as well. We pray for them to fall in late September or early October for an LSU game, but, they never do. The sorority girls sweating through fall outfits they are tricked into wearing by a 68 degree morning, the afternoon burning through the atmosphere and their immeasurable hope.
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I guess the good lord decided “Y’all will have the best food on the planet and be alcoholics. Nothing more, nothing less.” He’s trying to sweat all that out of us.
The food is something you can grow immune to until you pass over the border in any direction. The flavors like the difference between black and white and technicolor TV. This is a reference anyone born after 1976 will not understand. I am not sorry. We had four networks and 13 channels. I know this because every channel had it’s own button. The remote switched the channel up. That’s it. You went up until you got through 13 and then it went back to 1.
The food though…
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The good lord gave Louisianian’s food and a good time party attitude. He also influenced the good people in State government to vote to allow us to walk around cities with open beers. When we come to your town, we will walk out of a bar with a beer and watch your face melt. We don’t care. Most of us are obese and have the diabetus, but we shan’t suffer having to leave our beer at a bar unfinished whilst we walk to our trucks to drive home. Well at least South of I-10. To be fair, the part of Louisiana north of I-10 is all just South Arkansas. Tell me all about the cuisine of Arkansas…I’ll wait.
The food can be nuanced and delicate, but a lot of times it’s heavy handed. If a tablespoon of butter will do, a big chunk will be more better. We will fry anything. ANY. THING. Pig ass, yep, alligator, sure, twinkies? Can’t hurt. Above all, it will be seasoned.
Seasoned doesn’t mean “a lil salt and pepper”. Every time an ingredient hits the pan, salt and pepper follow. Followed by real pepper. Either cayenne or crushed red or some sort of season all. Slap Your Mama, Tony’s, Zattarain’s. Concoctions of salt, cayenne, onion, garlic and whatever else we can throw in there. The real one’s make their own. “We have Old Bay,” those Mason Dixon line dwellers will say.
We shall not sully our ingredients with that flavorless atrocity.
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But Autumn, no, we don’t have that. We wouldn’t know what to do with it if we did. We’d feel spoiled and undeserving by it’s beauty and dry crispness. Of a sky not filled with haze. Of a third season signaling “sweater weather. There is hot and humid and cold and wet the former lasting nine months, the latter three.
We will suffer, and drink, and eat, and drink and sweat, and we will judge your food and bless your hearts.
But those perfect four days.
They will be glorious.
#hugsandhi5s
Old Bay, seriously WTF!
Black and white vs. technicolor
Perfect analogy !
Great read!