This evening

It is 7:47 pm. It is still light outside, although the sun has gone down. It is a New Orleans twilight. I am sitting on the stoop outside my half-shotgun house in the Bywater, waving goodbye to my soon-to-be ex-husband as he gets into his rental car and heads off to the airport Hilton. The car is a Chevy Malibu - "Aloha!" he says as he drives off.

We've just had a pizza dinner and some wine. He has just - so nice of him - set up a new printer he bought for me, and set up the sound bar for my new giant 50-something inch flat screen TV. I didn't really want a TV, but we had two in storage, and he suggested I include this one in the shipment of my belongings from California. It's a good idea, and I'm grateful to him. Although I rarely watch TV, it makes sense that I have this one instead of buying another one. And who knows? Maybe I'll start watching, now that I'm living a different kind of life.

I'm thinking a girls' night series of femme fatale movies.

Outside in the street, on the other side of Chartres, the train is rolling past. It has a rhythmic clank-clink-clack thing going, but also a kind of metallic shrieking as wheels abrade on the tracks. It's the soundtrack of life down here.

The sky is still a beautiful blue, shot through with clouds that are suffused with gold. The concrete steps are warm under my bare feet from the afternoon sun. The scent of my potted gardenia is released in the night air. There's a mockingbird going on and on that won't shut up - I hear him even in the middle of the night sometimes.

This is how my summer begins.