To really live here, you have to stay the summers, into the depths. Into exhausted August, when hurricanes brew in the nether regions, and honest-to-god-fear wriggles up the most starched of skirts. No one can block the worry out; these days of predicted tempests mingling with the ghosts of those past. The evacuations. The flooded kitchens.

To say you live here, you can’t run off for more than a few months in summer. You have to drive back down I-10, past the Canal Street Hotel, which looms against the freeway’s edge, with it’s busted windows rimmed in graffiti. You drive like a lunatic, back into the air like a fist to the face.

It’s okay if you leave, of course. Anyone would. And we all do. But to come back during this wicked, wanton, God’s-breath-down-your-back season is to love the Deep South in the way she needs to be loved––with a whole lot of patience.

The heat runs on, like a Faulkner paragraph, over 100 degrees every day. Margaret Orr looks stoic on WDSU, as she points to a map painted in pink, purple and a demonic shade of red. Were it a nail polish, the name on the bottom of the bottle might read Slap Your Mama or Sanguine Stupidity.

Our air-conditioners rattle in the 200-year-old walls, protesting the relentless pace each must provide just to hover around 76 degrees. Bills sit with ripped envelope edges, crawling upwards from $100 to $200 to long past $300 a month.

Then it happens. Summer breaks. The early mornings hit the 70s, mild as peach fuzz, beckoning. You can open a door without wincing. The rain hits the dirt and soaks in slowly, no longer sizzling.

I ran to the pool last week and splashed in, the top few inches mercifully unbaked and full of chilly liquid straight from the clouds. I cracked a Paradise Park at noon, and yelled for Chris to join me. A tiny celebration.

New Orleans in Autumn is my favorite. We let our hair down. Not in a metaphorical sense, but literally, down the backs of our necks again. For the first time since May, we are no longer perpetually wet. We gather in courtyards again, beneath sketchy power lines, at tables that wobble on uneven stones. We talk about the weather non-stop, like creatures from another planet. Blinking in wonderment, we look directly at the sun, as it sits in the sky, so normal.

New Orleans is her most luscious in Autumn. Her most hospitable and randy. It becomes, again, the very best place to live.

If you’re brave enough to stay the summer and really call yourself a local then this week has been that ultimate reward.

If you aren’t from around here, as they say, it’s time to come back and visit. We will save you a courtyard and a tall Pimm’s Cup.