Pressing play in the Delta heat: season one in paradise

By Lora Delhom

Parker Posey said filming The White Lotus in Thailand felt like “New Orleans, Austin, Atlanta hot,” except it was like stepping into a car with the heat blasting, even at night. She described stuffing bags of ice under her thighs just to survive the shoot.

This summer, in the Delta’s relentless heatwave, I understood exactly what she meant. As a perimenopausal woman trying to find herself, without sea breeze and without bags of ice, I’ve spent these still, breathless days sitting in my own body and my own mind, in a kind of slow-burning search. The heat hasn’t broken, and maybe neither have I. But something is shifting.

There’s a moment in the first season of The White Lotus, the sun-drenched satire of wealth and unease on HBO Max, when newlywed Rachel realizes paradise hasn’t made her feel better. If anything, the more beautiful the setting, the more uncomfortable she becomes. Her new husband sulks when she accepts a freelance writing job, something to tether her to who she was before she stepped into his world.

“We’re in paradise,” he insists. “What more could you want?”

But paradise doesn’t pause reality. It magnifies it.

I moved to Leland last year with my husband and two boys. He came for research in Stoneville, and we came with love, hoping for slower mornings, space to grow and a home where the air smells like soil and seasons. We moved so the boys and I could spend more time with him doing what he loves.

But intention doesn’t make belonging instant.

Within weeks of arriving, I was hit with shingles. Not a metaphor: the real, painful kind that leaves nerve endings buzzing long after the rash fades. I was homeschooling, healing and unpacking, both physically and emotionally. I couldn’t seem to settle: not in my house, not in my skin, not in the narrative.

Over this summer, I drove to Chicago for my birthday and then to New Orleans, searching, I think, for a version of myself that hadn’t yet unraveled. But even those drives triggered pain and a recurrence. My nervous system kept asking a question my heart already knew: Are we home yet?

Tanya In The White Lotus drifts like a ghost, searching for connection but unsure how to ask for it. She arrives with her mother’s ashes, books a spa treatment, and blurts out too much too soon. She is grieving, but no one quite knows what to do with that grief, least of all Tanya. Watching her, I felt the ache of trying too hard to belong. Tanya is not comic relief to me. She is familiar. She is a woman navigating loss in a world that no longer has rituals for mourning. She is a mirror for what happens when the pain we carry has nowhere to land.

Like Rachel in The White Lotus, I thought I was arriving in a dream. But instead, I found myself quietly wondering: Where am I in this story?

My husband’s dream had gravity. I moved toward it, and, somewhere along the way, the gravitational pull took hold. I became the moon to his planet: circling, steady, supportive, but no longer the center. Women have a lot to navigate: ambition, caregiving, partnership, identity. We don’t always notice when we drift from our own axis.

I started noticing it in other women, too; that quiet tilt, like someone who’s lost their axis and is just beginning to reclaim it. One of my dear friends had already moved for her husband’s academic career. She packed the boxes, enrolled the kids and made each place livable. But this time, the move was for her. She got the full-time university job. And, even as she left, I saw it: that flicker of recognition I’ve carried in myself. What part of me got paused along the way? And what does it mean to finally press play again?

I miss her already:  her dune buggy margarita run over, her love of my baked goods, her way of showing up right when the ache of dislocation felt too loud to name.

But I’m hopeful, because something unexpected began to shift this year. I started meeting new people around town. I got an art show back in New Orleans. I was asked to write an article here for the paper. Now writing and creative expression has become a daily rhythm, a way of seeing and a way of being seen again. People ask if I have a journalism degree, but what I really have is stories. Writing them down has been cathartic and grounding, a slow stitching back to myself.

Now, as the school year begins and routines return, I find I’m not just writing about Leland. I’m writing into it. I’m finding belonging, one paragraph at a time.

Some days, I’m still Rachel: uncertain and aching. But, most days now, I’m something steadier. A woman with a pen in her hand and dirt on her shoes. An artist and a storyteller finding her place, even as the cast keeps changing.

People now call my name in the Stop and Shop. It’s small, but it means something. I’m here. I’m known, even a little.

And if you’re new, too, or ever feel out of place, come sit by us. If I’m supposed to be somewhere, you might need to tell me. Please shoot me a text.

Leland Season Two White Lotus watch party, anyone?

Now, someone please remind me: Who’s bringing the cheese straws?