Lucinda Williams and the Idea of Louisiana

My mother would listen to Lucinda Williams in the car. My first memory of it, Lucinda’s voice, would have been at 7 or 8 years old, around the time my parents split up. I’m putting this in the conditional tense because of my uncertainty on the facts. This memory would be in the car, because that was the year my mother took an apartment outside of New Orleans to be closer to work. It would have been a small apartment that we moved into, far from my father’s house in Baton Rouge. To get to it, you would have had to take a long drive that passed under a grain elevator that loaded barges on the Mississippi. I don’t remember anything about that time as clearly as I remember the smell of the grain elevator. My sister and I slept on the second floor of the little apartment. I could have seen a swamp from my bedroom window, and on some Saturday mornings, between days at my new elementary school, I would have wandered into the muck of it to look at the family of nutria living together there. My mother slept on the couch in the living room and, if that sounds untidy, sleeping on the couch in the living room, I assure you it was not. She would have made her white sheets on the couch with tight hospital corners at night, and then unmade them every morning before work so that the couch could be used during the day. Some nights, I would wake at the sound of a horrible noise below, and when I would investigate halfway down the staircase, I would have seen her cleaning in the living room, running a vacuum before bed. She had been through crisis before. She had her ways of getting through it.