January

I wish I were in New Orleans right now.

I was there last spring. It was a festival in the French Quarter. There were bands playing up and down the street, in Preservation Hall and on the grassy bank of the Mississippi. Saxophone, accordion and clarinet and horns and more horns. We walked around in the thick warm air drinking luridly coloured drinks. We lucked into Tujague's Creole restaurant that first night, drinking juleps with fresh-ground mint, standing at a bar that was ordered from Paris in the 1850s. The bartender was perfectly perfunctory and free-poured.

People danced everywhere. 

The only thing like snow was the powdered sugar on the beignets.

There was rust and flowers and heat and brass bands.