Well Bottom Blues

I regularly walk in the strip of New Orleans City Park between City Park Avenue and the remains of Bayou Metairie, the only natural body of water among the WPA-dug lagoons.  I don’t use the sidewalks but wend my way around and between the trees in an erratic path, clocking the radial roots to avoid puddles, crunching through acorns under Spanish moss fall and passing under as many oak branch arches as I can. There are pairs of oaks I always pass between as through a gate. I wonder what the other park goersm sitting at leisure, think of my erratic path.

These are old growth Live Oaks, ost centuries older than the city, the McDonough oak dated at over 800 years old. I would often think of these trees as grandfathers or degender them into great-great-grands, but I’ve decided to start calling them grandmother trees. Women always outlive men so as to pass on their wisdom. The palmettos mestled in their roots as they do down here I call child. Now I call the towering phallic cypresses grandfather trees. They are all the living monuments in the temple of my elders and my conception of the gods.