Crawfish Boils, Hill Legs, and De-load Weeks

Lift Clique 015: April 17, 2025

In this issue:

• Crawfish boil

• Week 7 check-in

• Chest day pump pics

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Marsh to Mountain

We’re boiling crawfish tomorrow, and I've just been bubbling over like a seasoned pot about it. Shopping for the fixings, calling all the seafood places in the area to find who sells them, and clearing up the overgrowth near the barn where we’ll gather. I’m just so excited.

It’s been a few years since the boil gear last came out and I always love an excuse to host friends—so a few weeks ago I sent the invites, marked the calendar, and started to track down how and where one might acquire live crawfish near Polk County, Tennessee.

It took me almost until the date to find the best fit: a delivery service that picks up crawfish near Baton Rouge and drives them overnight to the Georgia-Tennessee-Alabama tri-state area. My backup plan if something like this hadn’t come about was to find a place in Atlanta that I could order from. Four hours round-trip was worth it to me to make this boil dream happen. But thanks to the folks I found earlier this week, I can pick them up in Cleveland, Tennessee—just a 20-minute drive. I’m meeting the guy in a gas station parking lot tomorrow morning.

In Louisiana, it’s easy to find crawfish. When I was growing up, it felt like there were crawfish boils every Friday of spring. That’s when they start getting big enough to enjoy, but also there was a bit of Catholicism behind that schedule: we didn’t eat meat on Fridays in Lent, although seafood didn’t count. So we boiled. It’s a type of fasting that’s supposed to purify your body and spirit in preparation for the resurrection on Easter. Funny that we turned to mudbugs in the name of purification.

I don’t really think my parents’ social circle thought about it all that deep. It was just an excuse to party and get wildly beer drunk. But still, that was supposedly the root of it, even if it got distorted.

My dad sent this picture of me holding a “fawfiss.”

I want to continue that tradition. Not for religious or purification purposes, but for the sake of community. And not every spring Friday, either—crawfish are so expensive now, especially when they’re shipped from five states over. But Good Friday just before Easter felt like a nice time to gather, welcome the warmer weather, and play host to all the new friends I’ve come to love in the last few years here.

It's taken a bit to get my sea legs in Tennessee. Or, maybe I should say, get rid of my sea legs. In the literal sense, growing up on the coast meant lots of fishing trips through the marshes and waterskiing in Bayou Teche near my grandparents’ house. Now I’m living on a small mountain.

And in a more metaphorical sense, I spent my first thirty-or-so years constantly adapting, balancing and rebalancing, never feeling quite stable either at home or within myself, sort of lazily and obediently adjusting to whatever stronger force or louder voice called for my flexibility—be it parent, partner, or natural disaster. I got a sick rush of pride from being so adaptable.

Moving to a place so slow and quiet has necessitated lots of inner work. I’ve learned that when the floor beneath you isn’t rocking over storm waves, you don’t need to be constantly shifting your balance in order to stay upright. Maybe some of the turbulence is all in your head because it’s what you’ve come to expect. And maybe if you gain a firm footing, breathe in some clean mountain air, spend some time talking to a tree, you’ll notice that the ground is firm and solid here. There’s an opportunity to become like the mountain itself. Establish footing and not budge. Find your hill legs.

All of that is to say, I’m ascribing lots of meaning to this crawfish boil. It’s a culmination and a beginning. Sharing a bit of home with some folks who make this new place feel like it’s home, too. I’m sure we’ll eat far too much, drink a good bit, get our hands super messy, and laugh until the sun goes down.