Fallen Blossoms

As many of you may have realized, I keep a daily journal.  Occasionally I post a page from it... if I think it's interesting of relevant for some reason. 

Today, I am sitting with my morning coffee, at the patio table in front of St. V's .  

It's a nice enough spot, between the street and myself is a 3 tiered cast iron fountain that's just off balance enough to make all the water drip down one side and its shaded by an ancient clump of banana plants that tower 15 feet in the air.  Of course the gardener in me wants to get a sharp knife and clean out dead leaves and maybe hack out a spent trunk or two, but it's perfectly healthy and producing several bunches of bananas.

One of 

these bunches hangs directly over the table, and having already produced fruit, it continues to produce non-fruiting male flowers, daily peeling back a brick red petal from its growing tip to expose a dozen or so 3 inch long, nectar oozing flowers which detach and scatter over the table below.  These florets may have fallen, but they are still full of sugary liquid, a fact hardly lost on the local honey bees who crawl and buzz around the mass like conventioneers around a complimentary buffet.

I wonder if, like these bees, we on New Orleans, are feeding on past glories.

While it's true that this is one of the most important docks in the United States, its also true that large parts of this town are already, technically,  below sea level.  

As global warming progresses, as sea levels rise, and hurricanes become stronger and more frequent, there may come a time that it no longer becomes practical or possible to keep the waters at bay. 

We may be, like my morning honeybees, squeezing sustenance from a still productive, but no longer living, blossom.