Brought it on Home...

Bienvenue!

I came back home to New Orleans after a 5 years absence. I had been craving to go home for over two years but time & circumstances would not allow it to happen before this fall.

I've created the Burnt Toast blog to document my experiences especially in this 1st year through my photography, muses & whatever suits me. In part, I want to experience being part of the never to be repeated, I pray, revitalizing & reinvention of New Orleans. It will be my own eyes & how I see the fits & starts, hills & valleys as I see this quirky, magnificent, perplexing, never a moment of boredom, resilient city glow as it never has before.

My family's stamp is all over the city & goes back a century or more.My maternal grandmother in the early 1900's worked at Two Sisters where she passe blanc(passed for white) in order to support her only daughter who was too brown to pass off.

In the 1940's my parents met & fell in love right on 600 block Burgundy in the French Quarters where my father, a handsome, striking musician home after the war (WWII) moved next door. My mother was living with my Uncle Ellis a French speaking Creole who own a very successful bar & restaurant at that time called the Golden Pumpkin. According to family lore, it was the hangout for the Zulus during Mardi Gras. My mother worked there.

Shortly, before I was born my parents moved to Gert Town on Fig Street (I was a Charity baby) but before I was 5 months old bought a house in the Lower Ninth Ward which became my childhood home.

In my teens my mother moved us to Southern Cali only for me to return to N.O in my early 20's then back to Cali for another 22 years returning in 1997 living in both the Marigny & Uptown until I left in 2004 for work.

I only escape being in Katrina narrowly by the job offering me an additional year otherwise I would have been here in Katrina, other family members were not as fortunate.

But like a boomerang I would always return to New Orleans as I did this year.Whatever it is that pulls me back I cannot get voice to that yet. I just want to see what will flow this time around. So welcome to this thyme...