I had to admit, driving toward the center of the city of New Orleans on March 16th, smack in the middle of our Spring Break road trip, that as the neighborhoods got sketchier the closer we came to the French Quarter, maybe three small-town Wisconsin girls should have looked into bringing some male friends with us. Perhaps some football players.

Or a few dozen Marines.

We left the car in a slightly shady parking garage on the outskirts of the French Quarter, and set out to find Jackson Square. We only walked in the exact opposite direction for... oh, two miles or so.

I wanted to like it, I really did, but I had to concede after the first few minutes of fearing for my life that I did NOT like New Orleans.

Every other door we passed had a creepy old woman offering to read our palms, and I’m fairly certain one of the voodoo stores was being run by a corpse who’d escaped from Lafayette Cemetery a few blocks down. In desperation, we stopped for a few (dozen) hurricanes in a pizza parlor - and everything became hysterically funny after that. We found Bourbon Street, and eventually the Jackson Square we’d been so keen to find.

The square was an oasis in the middle of a city I later learned is considered the third most dangerous in the entire United States. The lush, well-tended green grass and the purple blossoms blowing from the trees almost made me believe I had walked out the back door of a voodoo store to find Narnia waiting on the other side. General Jackson occupied the square’s center, fittingly, and as we strolled I discovered that, actually, I was rather taken with New Orleans. It was dirty, and didn’t feel entirely safe, but I announced to my traveling companions that I thought the entire French Quarter was touched with a surreal splendor that was almost intoxicating.

Of course, it’s very possible that was the hurricanes talking, but at home, looking back at the photos I took in New Orleans, it isn’t the ones of Lafayette Cemetery which stand out the most, nor the narrow streets with their horse-drawn buggies, but a flower I can’t name slowly bobbing on a breeze in the middle of Jackson Square. Taken haphazardly at best, it is what makes me most think of our brief New Orleans adventure. Like the unnamable flavor that makes up the city itself, a thing this beautiful doesn’t belong in such a place - yet it flourishes. It reminds me that there are times one has to search more closely for beauty in things, and that once found, it is more than worth the effort.

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