My Sunshine Away by M. O. Walsh Read Free Book Online

know, let’s get this out of the way.
    It’s hot here, yes. It rains and it floods.
    If you say, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” it’s because you’re from some other sunny place where you thought it was hot. It’s
both
the heat and humidity. It’s okay. You’ll survive. There are ways to get along.
    One thing you do is amplify the pleasure of meals. Three times a day you sit down with friends or family who, if you’re lucky, are often the same. You take a break from the heat. You set a napkin over your lap and you can’t believe the utter joy. This tomato might just save your life, the cool fruit of it, that cold beer or iced tea your salvation. This is not gluttony.
    You eat this way for a reason.
    When everything else is burning, sweating, beaten down by a torturous sun, only your tongue can be fooled. So you tease it with flavors like promises, small escapes from a blatantly burdensome land. You offer it up sharp spices, dark stews, iced cocktails. Anything you can think of to do.
    There is a saying in South Louisiana that “when we eat one meal we talk about the next,” and this is true. Who wouldn’t? In this imagined menu lies a future, a forecasted life, a community, perhaps even a weekend full of cheer and good food. What should we cook on Saturday? you wonder. Yes, honey, yes, darling, believe me when I say that sounds good. And at the house across the street, a similar family is doing the same. Perhaps a Sunday spent over a pot of beans. A lunch of hot po’-boys wrapped in butcher paper. It is also an unwritten rule that we don’t talk politics at the table. This is not because we’re dumb or old-fashioned or just too polite, but rather because we see right through it.
    Middling stuff, the world. Nothing worth mucking up a fine meal.
    And so the soul of this place lives in the parties that grow here, not just Mardi Gras, no, but rather the kind that start with a simplephone call to a neighbor, a friend. And after the heat is discussed and your troubles shared you say man it’d be nice to see you, your kids, your smile. And from this grows a spread several tables long, covered in newspaper, with long rows of crawfish spilled steaming from aluminum pots, a bright splash of red in the blanketing green of your yard. It is food so big it must be stirred with a paddle. You gather around this. You worship it. There is nothing strange about that.
    Only the unfortunate don’t see it this way.
    When I was in my twenties, I had a short-lived friendship with a fellow from Michigan. He had moved here for college, and so I bragged to him the way that all of us down here do, about our food, our hospitality, those mantles we cling to. I invited him to a friend’s party in the Garden District of Baton Rouge, a neighborhood full of old majesty and wraparound porches. Our host, one of the cavalry of great unknown cooks in this state, slaved all day over a steaming pot of crawfish. He offered my friend local beer and iced watermelon, anything to ease the day’s scorch. Then, when the table was piled high with boiled corn and potatoes, spicy crawfish from a pond not too far away, my friend backed away from the crowd. Dig in, we all said. We’ll show you how to peel.
    He was polite but did not budge, insisting that he just wasn’t hungry.
    “Your loss,” we said, and we meant it.
    Later, in the car, he told me that he couldn’t believe I had eaten that.
    “They’re mudbugs,” he said. “You guys were just eating a pile of insects. It’s more disgusting than I thought it would be.”
    I did not begrudge him his idiocy. Instead I explained to him that the crawfish is technically a crustacean, no different biologically than the lobster he’d likely ordered at the finest restaurant in Ann Arbor,the term “mudbug” a misnomer. What he’d witnessed, I told him, was great luxury on a miniature scale.
    “All I saw were bugs,” he said. “All I saw were drunk and sweaty people, sucking on the