Cold Drinks, Hot Ozones

So this morning I keep hacking up pieces of my lung. Not really but it feels that way. I've had like three cups of herbal green tea because two weeks at my sister's house seems to have given me some sort of respiratory issue. Oh yeah, serious. God love RJ, she's our new matriarch now that mom's gone away, but she's grown into an official unapologetic chain smoker: and if you're gonna flip the middle finger in the face of fate and the Surgeon General's warning, well, unapologetic is what you might as well be. I think she's up to two and a half packs a day, but if you wanna know for sure, YOU ask her, I'm not. Even an honest hey-your-choking-me-to-death cough gets an eye roll from her, there's no way I'm asking how many packs per day old smokey's up to. I dared mentioned the patch to her one day and she was like "blah blah blah *puff* *puff* you &^%$%@$#!! *puff* *puff*".

Her smoking was another of the subtleties of a deep southern lifestyle I picked-up on during my visit; commonalities there which are now taboo or at least uncommon here. I began noticing things while at home for mom's funeral but even more came into play without the fog of grief or covered dishes coming through the door at all hours.

Like in south Mississippi, where mom and dad are, a quick trip to the nearest market for a gallon of my beloved skim milk turned into a two hour trek which bared no fruit. Seriously, skim milk is impossible to find in the deep, deep recesses of the south. At least two store clerks told me I could likely find some "to the Super Wal Marts".... some of them put an 'S' at the end of Wal Mart, don't ask me why. But is it REALLY necessary to find the Super Wal Mart just to satisfy my evening craving for skim milk? In Tylertown, Mississipi, you bet your sweet possum it is.

RJ's town is Lafayette, a mid-sized city in the heart of 'Acadiana', local term for Cajun country. It has two shopping malls, lots of crawfish and tons of shopping to pacify the SUV-cruising oil field housewives. As Louisiana goes, Lafayette is provincial; sprawling and clean, a nice enough place to raise a family, if that's your thing. The economy is still firing on all cylinders but I assume they'll catch up with the rest of the country on that soon enough. That being said, recycling seems to be a foreign concept to the masses there. Asking one of the kids where the recycle bin was one morning got me a confused look that turned into a stink-eye when I grumbled about wasting another can.

Maybe it's a new yankee trait I've picked up, and maybe it's just raw concern about growing landfills, but I've grown intolerable of ditching cans and plastics into trash cans. What a waste, right? Not down home, all's the same as it ever was and why not? Land comes cheap. RJ assures me I can have a room when global warming hits the Northeast.

Posted by JD on May 8, 2008 8:04 PM