My week in New Orleans was mostly good, even though I walked too much the first day and very little the second. I often ate too much and not from the healthy menu. Of course, in NOLA a fried oyster poor boy and beignets are not only healthy, but also compulsory. I rode the street cars, went to museums and heard live jazz, annoyed as I was that one of the performers asked for requests but knew no lyrics by Irma Thomas. Shameful and chauvinistic. She is the only female musician who has a statue in Music Park. I stayed through three beignets anyway. I saw way too many beggars and homeless people on the streets of the Quarter. I stepped around too many deep potholes in the old sidewalks and passed too many gift shops with the same feathery gewgaws. At times I was hungry for something other than fried and sugary sustenance.

Other than walking too much on the very hard and often hazardous sidewalks of the Big Easy, I spent many hours writing or worrying about not writing. How did my retreat/vacation become a burden? I don’t know. I came home yesterday with good intentions of continuing the work and writing faithfully to the end of the novel in progress. The TO-DO list includes typing up all the handwritten pages I lugged home. But today the fussy child in me says, no, don’t want to. So maybe I’ll take a little stay-cation from that project and finish some of the non-writing things on my list: reading grant applications for the cultural council, submitting poems for publication, sending off a new poem (about NOLA) to my critique group, hearing about the family’s stay at the cabin, reuniting with my dog.

Then again, knowing me, I’ll sneak in a few ideas for the novel as I write my daily journal, and that long, challenging project will haunt me until I sigh, pick up the pen and get back to work. Long fiction offers more problems and puzzles than does poetry or short fiction. Solving these problems draws me in. I can use some of what I saw in NOLA to enrich a story that takes place in Providence, RI. People are people everywhere, and what I saw on those broken sidewalks will stay with me and become, as does so much experience, part of the gumbo that is fiction. And it will be delicious.