this is how we live here
a sunflower's journey to joy
I dressed up as a sunflower for Mardi Gras day!
Sunflowers are kind of my thing, which I know is super original.
As a kid, I always drew pictures of them and dreamt about the day I could have a garden full of them. When I bought my house, I also bought a pack of sunflower seeds with just that intention, but they had to sit for a while as I transformed my backyard into something not resembling a jungle filled with river sand, weeds that towered over me, and buried bricks. It took me a couple of years to clear it out and carve out a garden bed, but I was most productive garden-wise after a bad breakup and I was blessed in my early homeowning years with many of those, so now I have a beautiful garden.
A friend and I eventually planted the sunflower seeds a couple of years in, plopping them into the ground haphazardly all around my yard. They were old and I wasn’t expecting much, but sure enough, they popped up. And they grew. And they kept growing until eventually they were taller than me. I harvested those seeds and planted them again the following year and they grew even taller that year—Big Daddy, as I called him, shot up to 11 feet! I kept harvesting and planting year after year and now we have a whole ass tradition at the Beaulieu household (me and my dog).
So, I love sunflowers. And I’ve always wanted to be one for Mardi Gras, but the timing was never quite right.
Until this year.
This was the first year I’ve done a full Mardi Gras since my Maw Maw died five years ago. The year after she died, I couldn’t imagine being out on the streets she had taken me out to every year when I was a kid, so I ran away to Mexico (again v original), to a little island called Holbox. I was relieved to be away and took a deep breath on the ferry as it tooted its way across the water. I knew I had made the right decision. I knew I needed some space to grieve away from all that joy and dancing in the street….and then I stepped off the boat and right into Mexican carnival (lol I forgot Carnival was universal) and Maw Maw was right there with me anyway.
The next year I did a halfway Mardi Gras, but my heart wasn’t really in it, and then the pandemic hit and I’ve been hiding out in Mexico for Carnival ever since. But I knew this was the year—not only to come home for a full Mardi Gras, but also to finally dress up as a sunflower.
I ordered a $7 headpiece as the base and then jujjed it up with rhinestones and feathers. I popped my face in, which fit as the head of the flower, the petals framing my face, put on some green overalls and white classic reeboks and went outside on Fat Tuesday to find out a whole lot of people love sunflowers just as much as I do.
I spent the day taking pictures with strangers, waving to the world like a sunflower queen, my hands enveloped in little green leaves, yelling at everyone to “have a sunny day!” I “bloomed” up and down Frenchman, starting down low with my leaf hands covering my face, winding and twisting my way up until my hands moved aside to show my smile—the apparent bloom. It was a hit, and it was the perfect re-introduction to Mardi Gras. Maw Maw was with me the whole time.
She loved sunflowers, too. Every year, I took some seeds over to her house and planted them in her garden, the site of where I first dug my hands in the dirt and pulled out weeds and gave things space to grow. The last time I saw her before she died, she brought me over to the side of her house where the first ones were beginning to bloom. She pointed out one she had thought wasn’t going to make it, its stem all crooked and snaked around parallel to the ground like they do sometimes when they’ve been stepped on as seedlings. But sure enough, there was the bloom. Close to the ground but beautiful and bright and yellow.
I’ve seen a lot of posts in the last 48 hours wrapping up Mardi Gras with videos of joy and costumes and music and revelry with some variation of the same caption: This is why we live here.
I actually hear that phrase a lot during Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest and Super Sunday and any other opportunity we take to go out into the streets and showcase our beauty and joy. And honestly, I don’t really like the sentiment. It feels transactional. Like we’re trading in our potholes for a gross of beads. Like we’re swapping our carjackings for doubloons. Our murder rate for Battle of the Bands.
Our sorrow is not currency. It is not the cost we pay for being joyous. And we don’t deserve joy because we endured pain. We deserve joy period.
It’s not why we live here; it’s how we live here.
The relationship between joy and sorrow is not transactional, it’s relational. They are connected and mutually dependent (which is something I talked about last week). They live together and make room for each other, taking turns leading and following in an emotional fais do-do, simultaneously deepening the grooves in our heart on any given Tuesday, not just the one. Because our joy is not just bottled up in the days of Mardi Gras or music festivals. It is omnipresent along with our pain. It is how we experience our lives here every day, and the recognition of our capacity to mutually experience joy and sorrow is what brings us together as a community. It’s how we so easily call each other baby and darlin. Because we see it in each other’s eyes. We are connected. We are family.
It could be argued that we have experienced an undue amount of sorrow down here in Louisiana and maybe that’s why we understand this connection between joy and suffering so well—how we live it so fully. We love because we have lost. We live because we have died. But it doesn’t really matter because it’s a universal truth. There is pain and suffering everywhere just as there is joy. And once you learn how to live with both, you’ve just begun to tap into the human experience. Which is why we open our doors and our city so often throughout the year: to share what we have learned so our visitors may go back home and show it to their families.
I walked home alone on Mardi Gras Day. I was still in my full sunflower regalia and feeling a little down—that the day was over, that the sun would soon be going down, thinking about my Maw Maw. Also feeling a little silly so far away from the bright costumes of the Quarter, a human-sized sunflower walking through a decidedly more chill Treme.
Three women walked towards me about a block down, leaving the Zulu parade route and decked out in purple, green and gold. They were singing loudly, waving their arms in the air and dancing as they walked. It took me a few seconds to make out what song they were singing, but then it came through clearly—You are my Sunshine. And then it took me another few seconds to realize they were singing to me. My little sunflower face broke out into the biggest smile of the day and my arms instinctively went up to wave and dance along with them. We came together in the middle of the block in a big group hug. Perfect strangers hugging me like Ronnie hugged me the day I told him Maw Maw died. Holding my hands like Ms. Addie did that same day, breaking our touch barrier for the first time ever, telling me it was going to be ok. That God was with me and so was she.
We jumped up and down in the street hugging as they finished their song, our faces turned towards the sun, our joy and sorrow on full display. Nothing but a bunch of stepped on seedlings determined to bloom.
*This post is dedicated to Nicole Williams and Roderick Tobias, the victims of shootings during Bacchus and Mardi Gras day. I wrote this essay with them heavy on my heart, including the four people additionally injured during Bacchus, knowing that every moment of joy I wrote about was experienced in tandem with the sorrow of their families and loved ones and the community as a whole. May they rest in peace.
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