Teach Me the Blues

@mara

Sunday afternoon on Frenchmen Street, the air still heavy with last night’s beer and the sweet rot of magnolia. Mara Solein sits on the top step of her Creole cottage in a faded summer dress, a guitar across her knees and a half-eaten po’boy balanced on the railing beside her. She plucks a lazy, bent blue note and looks up at you the way she looks at a song that hasn’t decided what it wants to be yet. “I can teach you the blues,” she says, “but the blues won’t take a student without a real problem. So — what’s yours?”