Grief, it turned out, became a doorway into my past, my family’s past, and the place of my beginnings. In returning to Louisiana, I felt at home – my body knew where it belonged. I bought a tiny house, just a five-minute walk from where my father and my aunt had been born. I planted little trees, learned the names of wild plants I had passed by as a child, explored wild places, re-learned how to live on the wide, flat, soggy, irrepressible and throbbing-with-life land.

Some of my values were tested. I had preached for years against the use of toxins in gardening , but now weeds of every kind choked little flower beds, threatened to take over my newly planted fruit trees. I still don’t know what to do about that. And while I’ve never been a fearful person, am pretty comfortable with “adventuring” into wild areas, finding alligator tracks on my morning walk, or spotting a snake slithering away just inches from my feet made me understand that Louisiana is a different world. A luxurious, complicated, tangled and lively place. And a little bit scary. So while I fall in love with it more every day, that love is complicated too.

The weather is steamy, sometimes overwhelmingly lovely, sometimes pretty cantankerous. And recently, shifting. I’ve driven down to “the end of the land,” in Lower Montegut and Isle de Jean Charles, and seen land slipping away, water taking over what used to be tiny towns. Learned more about the challenges of salt water intrusion into bayou country, where whole areas of live oak trees stand, their thick trunks hidden now in brown water.

Even in my little Louisiana home, grief hunts me down, is never far away – has become a new facet of my life as a vulnerable creature in this glorious and fragile world.

The following is a little journal entry written in the midst of a ferocious Louisiana storm –

4/14/18

We are all waiting for the storm –

On this morning’s walk, many wild and flowering things spotted – egrets and ibis on the flooded batture pond – blackberries ripening – blue vervain blooming – some lyre leaf sage still in flower. Wild onions line the levee trail, the yellow dock has begun to seed, wild irises lean over the ditch. Many frogs sing in the dew-heavy grass.

And then the storm begins. Tornado warnings blare. I scurry around, move everything that could blow away back into the shed, or against the wall. The sky darkens, clouds suddenly move fast in the opposite direction as the wind begins to gust. A bit of lightning flashes. A few birds brave the feeder. Thunder rumbles from afar as all the color bleeds out of the day.

I hunker down and wait. And think about care and loss and how to weather it all. I’m not sure how much I can stand to love this place, and then watch it disappear – my whole life, lately, an exercise in watching love sink down. But my Louisiana cousins have done it – kept the faith – stayed true to their roots and the water-logged soil they’re planted in.

Maybe all we can ever do is be quietly, imperfectly felled by love. Maybe all I can do is to write out that love in little halting bits – a few battered flower petals spilled on the ground of an ordinary life. I don’t know if this will matter at all. But we can never cease to love, to let our hearts be given away, and sometimes torn to shreds. Maybe that care can help heal and nourish our struggling world, our home place, our fellow creatures in this lovely and changing place. This home.