'Foggy' Memories of My Birthplace

"Randy and I are down Louisiana way."

That text popped in a family thread in January. My sister and her husband were on their way to New Orleans to set up their family business at an expo for the weekend. 

"New Orleans?" was my response.

Then my brother, Alan, asked if they were going to stop my our old house. The response was "no." That was until Alan chimed in that the house was just off of I-10 and they would be driving right by it. So, Amy stopped by and then came the posting of photo after photo. First was the home where Amy and I were born.

Then we started swapping memories including playing in the streets that used to flood every time it rained. You see, New Orleans is actually below sea level so it took a while for the water to drain after a storm. While I don't remember a ton about my birth city because we moved away when I was six years old or so, I do remember "swimming" in the street. Mom was not a fan of that. And she definitely did not like it when when the "fog man" came down the street. 

New Orleans is a mosquito infested kind of place. I don't remember how often the fog man and his truck that sprayed mosquito-killing insecticides rolled through the neighborhood, but it was pretty often. And we were dumb kids. We would run behind it, play in it and ride out bikes through it. Alan texted that it was most certainly some kind of DDT-laced stuff and sent this link, which looks pretty darn and dangerously accurate. 

Then Alan forwarded "a few blasts from the past," a series of throwback photos from the early to mid-1960s. The memories are a bit "foggy," but they still exist. And that's a great thing.

Our clubhouse, which Dad built for us boys. Funny thing is I remember it being so sleek, a great place to play and home to our guinea pig, Tiger (see photo below), who lived beneath it.

It never snowed in Louisiana but the one time it did, we needed about every bit of it in our yard to make this snowman.

A Mark Holyoak classic family photo of me cracking Alan in the head with the handle of a toy gun.

Kerry helping hold me upright. I wasn't even two years old when we were outside of church and a couple of teenage boys chasing each other plowed right over the top of me, breaking my left leg.