If you’ve never been to New Orleans in April, then you’ve never really been to New Orleans. April in New Orleans is festival season, when a city whose lifeblood is food and music, takes both to another level. Much of the year the climate of New Orleans is as harsh as the crime and economic injustices that have plagued the city for decades, but in April the weather tends to be more merciful, if not outright welcoming. All of this is enough to beckon tourists by the tens of thousands to follow the Mississippi River south to the city that care forgot, but for me, it will forever be the jasmine.
Honey and I have been making trips to New Orleans together, sometimes multi annually, for nearly twenty years. Outside of the places we’ve actually resided in, we have spent more time in the Crescent City than anywhere else. Crossing Lake Pontchartrain we can feel our spirits shifting gears from life in the fast lane to just coasting. Rarely do we have true plans for our time there, opting instead to take things as they come. We hear on the WWOZ Livewire that Amanda Shaw is playing at Rock-n-Bowl that night and say we might check that out. We always know we can catch John Boutte at D.B.A. on Thursdays or Rebirth Brass Band at Maple Leaf on Tuesdays. If everything falls together and the time is right and we feel like it, we might stop by for any or all of those shows. But maybe we don’t. For us, New Orleans in April has its own rhythm and we just try to move to the beat. Late breakfasts, long walks, big lunches, lots of coffee, sitting, watching, reading, talking. As Todd Snider sings, “Nowhere to go, no one to call, nothing to do except nothing at all.” In an instant we may be caught up in an adventure based upon a hint of information we pick up from someone sitting next to us in a restaurant or on a park bench, and off we go, but we are just as likely to let plans slip away that we’ve had all day, just because we weren’t feeling it.
It wasn’t always like this. In the early years of visits the city we were go, go, go, nonstop. Trying to do everything there was to do, trying to make up for lost time, trying to take it all in and experience everything. We had dogeared all the tourist guides for must see places and we had a good time doing it, but in time we developed a different relationship with the city. We weren’t tourists on vacation anymore. We felt like we were back home visiting family. Though we’ve never lived in New Orleans, the city will treat you like family if you let her. John Goodman said it best, “There’s an incomplete part of our chromosomes that gets repaired or found when we hit New Orleans. Some of us just belong here.” In previous visits to the city I’d touched this and felt it momentarily — especially the first time I visited when I was just 19 — but it would be April of 2015 before I learned to embrace it.
After twenty years of marriage, Honey and I were going on our honeymoon. For the first time in our married life we were going to spend a week together with no extended family, no children, not even another friend couple, just us and New Orleans in April. We knew that we’d be spending the weekend at JazzFest, but the rest of the time we had no plans. It was during one of these aimless days, meandering through the city as free as a butterfly that I first picked up the scent that has enchanted me ever since. Jasmine comes into full bloom in New Orleans in April and in some places there are literally entire walls of the vine exploding with thousands of blooms who exhale their essence to be carried by the breeze through the streets to mix and mingle with the sounds of music and the smells of food cooking. If I’ve ever encountered jasmine before this I couldn’t say. Even if I had, I assume there was something mystical in the scent being mingled with three hundred year old streets and buildings and the joie de vivre that awakened a new place in my soul. No matter how many deep breaths I inhaled, I just couldn’t get enough of this gentle scent. Our entire week was spent intoxicated with the scent of the city in Spring.
Encountering the jasmine blooms was like reconnecting with a long lost love that I never wanted to let go of again, so upon arriving back home, the first thing I did was plant a jasmine vine next to our covered back patio. Nearly a decade has passed since that initial encounter and I’ve made it a priority to plant jasmine wherever we live since then. This morning, sitting on my front porch, far north of the New Orleans climate, and about a month later in the season, my jasmine has come into full bloom. As I drank my coffee and reflected upon my day, the breeze brought this old friend up next to me. I took a long, slow, deep breath, smiled and felt my soul shift gears.
