Shotgun House

On our recent vacation trip I carried in my shirt pocket a small notebook in which I wrote various things. Four pages are covered with things I came across or read about that piqued my interest. They were to remind me to look further into these subjects when I returned home. One of the things that I ran across while reading Jolie Blon’s Bounce by James Lee Burke was the term "shotgun house." I didn’t know what was meant. I’ve just now looked it up on the internet. It’s a house typical of certain areas of New Orleans in which the rooms are one behind the other. Supposedly you could fire a shotgun through the front door and it would exit at the back door. This is not quite true since the doorways in each room were usually not at the same place. But the idea is clear. A long narrow house just a single room wide and many rooms deep. The pictures I found were of quite attractive houses. Apparently they came about because of very narrow building lots in N.O. Let’s hope Katrina and Rita did not damage these houses irreparably.

On another note, the flu season is upon us. I got my flu shot today. Have you gotten yours yet?