Three of You Burned Palm

a reader's galerie, tuesday night. she says it was her mama's saucer.

I am going to keep this one shorter than usual, because the board did most of the work this week and I want to thank them first. Four nights, one storm, two hundred and eighty-eight posts, and not one real name, not one road, not one face. That is a board that knows the rules when it counts. I burned nothing in the stove this week. I am proud of you.

She is gone. She turned east Wednesday morning and came apart over open water. I will not print her name. Neither will the parish paper, and for once the Chronicle and I agree on policy.

Now. Three of you wrote me, separately, from three different parishes, to say that on Tuesday night, when the cone still had all of us in it, you went out on the galerie and burned a piece of blessed palm from Palm Sunday in a saucer, the way your grandmothers did, to turn her. One of you is a nurse. One of you is a retired engineer who wrote, and I quote, "I am not saying it works. I am saying I am not stupid enough to find out." One of you is nineteen.

The television says the turn was a trough of low pressure coming down from the north. I believe the television. I also believe a trough of low pressure has to come from somewhere, and nobody on the television could tell me who sent it.

Here is my read: I do not have one this time. I just think it is worth writing down that on a Tuesday night in August, in three parishes, people who do not know each other went out in the wind with a match and a saucer, and on Wednesday morning she turned. I write down what the basin gives back.

Power is still out on a few stretches. Check on your old people. Take them ice.

I relay. You decide.

In Truth and Terror.
— Beau