Eight

On da eighth day of Christmas, me and Rosalie,

ATE by ya mama's.

SEVENteenth Street Canal

Six Pack o' Dixie.

FRIED onion rings.

beFOUR you drive me nuts.

three french breads

Tujague's recipe

for the crawfish they caught in Arabi.

Yats don't go to someone's house, they go "by" someone's house. Or they "go by da grocery to get some shwimps." It threw me for a loop when I first started to study German in high school and learned the preposition, "bei." The usage is often quite similar in both Deutsch and Yat.

This is a little double at 919 Orleans Avenue. It doesn't have any historic merit that I know of, but a LiveJournal friend thought their mother-in-law's family might have owned it at some point, so I took a photo for them. It's a classic "shotgun" style, where you enter into the living room, then have to walk through the bedrooms to get to the kitchen, which is usually at the back of the house. If you open all the doors and shoot a shotgun, the blast will go right through and out the back door.

New Orleanians are big on family. Unless you're not speaking to your family, or obligations keep you away, we celebrate holidays with family. But the definition of "family" sometimes gets extended beyond blood relatives. Sometimes you become part of your friend's family as much as your friend is. So, it wouldn't be a big shock for a yat to call one of his friends who lives on, say, Planet Hooston, and tell them, "Yeah, we ate by your mama's last Sunday."

This strong sense of family has really messed up a lot of people post-storm, because the diaspora has made it all the more difficult for some families to re-unite. With the original family house standing gutted and unrepaired in Gentilly or Da Nint', and the family scattered from California to Florida, it's tough to get everyone together in some families. Still, we chug along. Even when there's someone missing from the celebration, we always talk about next time. Your cousins may still be stuck in Texas, but they'll be back for the big barbecue on the lakefront for the Fourth of July. We never give up hope.