Departure
As long as I can remember, I’ve been in the process of leaving.
The moment I started driving and got my first high school job, I started collecting odds and ends from thrift stores and stowing them away under my bed. Silverware. Cooking utensils. Extra linens. The necessities of independent, somewhere-out-there living. I saved my $7.25/hour paycheck with a level of frugality rarely seen in 16-year-olds. All with a singular goal in mind:
Leave Louisiana.
The cloying humidity. The hurricane season that would knock out power for over a week several times a year. The pothole-marked honeycomb roads. The backwards politics. It felt like my own personal purgatory: a suffocating shell of a place, exiled from anywhere worth being.
When I was very little, I wanted to live on the beach in Alabama. After a visit to my uncle’s in Colorado, Denver became the goalpost to reach. Clearly, my goal wasn’t any particular place. As my personal world map expanded, the destination shifted and changed - bit by bit.
And then I hit a road bump and stalled, when I got married.
Being “family-oriented” was part of my ex-husband’s careful veneer, and when it came to his facade, there was no room for compromise. I loved him, so I stayed.
Despite all my bluster and big talk about leaving… maybe I was always a little bit scared to go.
I made choices that kept me in Louisiana for far longer than I’d wanted. Almost as if, in giving others the power to give me permission, I could ignore the fact that I was always free to go - I would just have to do it alone.
About a year ago, as my divorce neared finalization, I decided that I was going to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail and cut every tie to Louisiana that I could. I quit my job. Sold my house. Sold every one of my possessions that wouldn’t fit in the smallest storage unit up the road.
But as I painstakingly removed these attachments, something surprising happened.
I started to feel oddly wistful about leaving.
All of the things I had taken for granted about my home started to become a little more precious. I found myself taking more time to drive the scenic route, walk along the levee, hike into the bayou. The little things that are distinctly Louisiana - the blue porch ceilings painted to match the sky, the drawn-out driveway goodbyes, the swelling roar of cicadas in summer, gas station counter food, the echoing, eerie silence amid the last breaths of hurricane wind, swampy grass, white-hot sun - stood out to me in a way they never had before.
So I picked up my camera, dug into the archives, and started a photography project to remember Louisiana by.
Some of these images were from many years ago. Some are more recent. They’re from all the places that make me think of Louisiana - state parks, my parents’ backyard, dirt single-tracks, from my many drives down River Road and backroads wanderings. They aren’t my usual static landscapes - I’m even part of this gallery in a rare self-portrait.
These images do their best to capture the morning light in my old house, the movement of a wind chime from my front porch, a waterline on the base of a bald cypress trunk, refinery equipment and power lines in the blue hour, sugarcane twisting in a thunderstorm. They are by no means perfect, or even pretty.
They’re the little moments I found beautiful in a place I begrudgingly called home, and together, are a representation of what Louisiana is to me - a final tribute before I leave for good.
