I used my retirement money to buy a boat-rental and bait business in New Iberia, and had my houseboat towed from New Orleans through Morgan City and up the Bayou Teche. Annie and I rode on the boat the last few miles into New Iberia, and we ate crawfish étouffée on the deck and watched our wake slip up into the cypress and oak trees along the bank, watched yesterday steal upon us-the black people in straw hats, cane-fishing for goggle-eye perch, the smoke drifting out through the trees from barbecue fires, the crowds of college-age kids at fish-fries and crab-boils in the city park, the red leaves that tumbled out of the sky and settled like a whisper on the bayou's surface. It was the Louisiana I had grown up in, a place that never seemed to change, where it was never a treason to go with the cycle of things and let the season have its way. The fall sky was such a hard blue you could have struck a match against it, the yellow light so soft it might have been aged inside oak.