A Summer Recipe
I tend to be the type of person who works things out in my heart and mind mostly by writing about them. Sometimes I share it publicly and other times I write it down just to get it out…
Author: Eve Crawford Peyton
To Mask or Not to Mask?
I guess I’m in the minority here, but I’ve never really minded the masks. I never found them hard to breathe in or uncomfortable. Sometimes I’d wear one into the store and forget to take it off even once…
Sparking Anything But Joy
I am a champion procrastinator, but even I couldn’t put it off any longer. It’s been two months since my mom died, and I finally had to reckon with cleaning out her place. Walking in was the hardest part…
One Day at a Time
It’s been two months now. I’m sure, at some point, I will stop counting the days and weeks and months since my mother’s sudden and unexpected death, but I’m not there yet. I still think, every Friday, about the…
Teen Angst
Due to some high school orientation activities, as well as her oral surgery, Ruby’s annual summer trip to St. Louis was later than usual this year. She normally spends all of June and July with her father and his…
Surgical Scars
Everything is admittedly bittersweet lately, less than two months after the sudden death of my mom, but my older daughter’s oral surgery, scheduled for this Thursday at Children’s Hospital, is especially so. Ruby, who inherited many of my good…
Camped Out
I’ve had such mixed luck with summer camp for my kids over the years. Ruby did a variety of camps with a variety of enjoyment levels, and although she adored Camp Point Clear, she opted not to go this…
Driving Me Crazy
Getting annoyed with this city is part of living here, I know. The boil orders. The crime. The messed-up streets. The confusing and not-great school system. The termite swarms and the flying cockroaches and the predatory camera tickets. And…
Loss and Love
My mom, my best friend, died suddenly May 4, at age 68. Now I’m trying to write her eulogy. The one thing that’s killing me right now is how proud my mom was of my writing. She read everything…
Where I Am
It’s been four weeks now. I’m in that weird stage where it hasn’t been nearly long enough to be “over it” (I will never be fully over it), but yet it’s not recent enough that I get a pass…
A Ray of Hope
In the middle of deep grief, there was good news: My older daughter, 14, was now eligible to get the COVID vaccine. Having given up the past year-plus of her life (no eighth grade graduation, no roller derby tournaments…
Grief Ramblings
I hope you like your blogs grief-flavored because that’s all I’m going to have on offer for the next … who even knows? All I know is that exactly two weeks ago, I was writing something here about LEAP…
My Mother's Unexpected Obituary
Pamela Ann Marquis, fierce and loving mother, adventurous and playful Gigi, hilarious and devoted friend, and versatile Jill of all trades, died suddenly May 4, 2021, in New Orleans. She was 68. She was born on Sept. 3, 1952,…
Looking Before We LEAP
I’m bad at a lot of things: navigating (even with Google Maps, I sometimes kind of … forget which way is right and which way is left), singing, parallel parking, doing my own makeup (or anyone else’s). I’m also…
The Dawning of Normal
I don’t know if it’s the change of the season – summer is right there on the horizon – or what, but suddenly I’m feeling plunged back into real, actual life, and I’m not entirely sure I’m ready. It’s almost…
Now It Can Be Told
I wrote this during the Kavanaugh hearings. That was a rough stretch for me – and way too many other women – and well, now I guess you know why, huh? I think my best friend still has a…
A Much-Needed Getaway
I don’t camp. That’s something you do not have to know me well to know about me. I don’t like, in no particular order: bugs, being hot, being cold, not having a bath tub, pooping in the woods, cooking…
Meal Kit Basics
My husband and I don’t exactly agree on the importance of different household aesthetics. He hates scented candles, Febreze-type sprays, and any other kind of “room fragrance”; I hate the overwhelming smell of dog that, left unchecked, pervades our…
None of That Jazz
I was sad to miss Carnival season this year, sadder than I originally expected. I normally wouldn’t call myself the world’s biggest fan of the whole thing; I tend to feel like the stress of traffic and parking and muscling…
Shoot Me Up
The whole past year has been an exercise in risk assessment: At first, when I really had no idea how to stay safe, everything was fraught and terrifying. Did I really need my prescription medications? Did I really need…
A Feeling of Hope
On a day like yesterday, an absolutely picture-perfect day right on the cusp on spring, with both of my children back in school, my husband receiving his second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and mine slated for Wednesday, the…
Teen Voices of the Pandemic: Re-Entry
Welcome back to our Teen Voices of the Pandemic Series, which is a series I just made up in which I make my teenage daughter write my blog for me. But the truth is, it’s not just my own…
Looking Back
A year ago today, we had the first reported case of COVID-19 in our city. I assumed a few more cases might follow, but I never ever saw any of the rest of this coming. In fact, this day…
A Full Year
Turning the calendar page to March is actually hitting me harder than I expected. I’m not really sure why. As I wrote last week, some things are starting to get back to a new kind of normal. (I hate…
It’s Been a Year
It’s been almost a year now. A year since I thought a quarantine sounded like a fun break. A year since I was mad that my March 17 conference in New York City was canceled. “It’s just like the flu,…
A Return to Sort of Normal
Between my work hours and my general low-key antisocial tendencies, I was sort of living like a hermit even before the pandemic. I mean, I’m not a sociopath or anything – I like most people, and I have a…
Vaccine Ethics
Back in late December, when I learned that anyone over 70 was soon going to be eligible for COVID-19 vaccines, it was via a text that came from NOLA Ready to my cell phone. I immediately began trying to…
Back to School, For Real This Time
Yesterday, as many of you no doubt already know, New Orleans K-8 public schools reopened. My older daughter is an eighth grader at Lusher, but she hasn’t been in a school building since March 13 and has no desire…
Carnival Spirit
Picture it: A bleak and freezing mid-February Tuesday in Columbia, Missouri, the sky gray, the trees bare and brown, black piles of plowed snow lining the busy street. I pull on gloves and a hat and boots and double socks…
A Modern COVID Carnival
One of the last happy memories I have of The Before Times was hitting all the parades with my older daughter, Ruby, a true Carnival die-hard. This kid attended her first parade at 9 weeks old (that may have…
Joie d'Eve
Living, loving, laughing, and learning in the new New Orleans
about
Eve is further proof, if any is needed, that New Orleans girls can never escape the city. After living here since the age of 3 and graduating from Ben Franklin High School, Eve moved to Columbia, Mo., where she received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Missouri School of Journalism and became truly, unhealthily obsessed with grammar.She had originally intended to strike out to New York City and work in the cutthroat magazine industry there, but after Katrina, Eve felt a strong pull to return home, to her roots, her family, her waterlogged and struggling city – and a much more forgiving work atmosphere that would allow her to skip a routine of everyday makeup and size 0 designer label business suits and enjoy the occasional cocktail or three with an absurdly fattening lunch. She moved back home in January 2008 and lives in Mid-City with her two daughters, Ruby and Georgia; her stepson, Elliot; and her husband, Robert Peyton.Eve blogs about the joys and struggles of living in post-Katrina New Orleans, the unique problems and delights of raising a child in such a diverse and challenging city – including her experiences with the public education system – and her always entertaining and extremely colorful family.Eve has won numerous writing awards, including the Pirates Alley Faulkner Society Gold Medal, the Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence award for column-writing and Press Club of New Orleans awards for her Editor’s Note in New Orleans Homes & Lifestyles and for this blog, most recently winning the award for "Best Feature Affiliated Blog."She welcomes comments, advice, empty flattery, recipes, drink invitations and – most especially – grammatical or linguistic debates.
