November 23, 2008

Some notes for you dear Ruby about life at my mother's houae on the Gulf Coast before Katrina.

There were concrete steps on either side of the mansion in Waveland, Mississippi and hydrangeas and oak trees. Dad used to put rusty nails in them to make the pink flowers turn blue.

By the walkway up to the house Dad planted a lemon tree.On the right hand side was a cedar tree and on that tree was wisteria and it smelled so nice and the
porch in front was cracked tile and blue high back chairs that matched the blue shutters on the house. Behind the house was a page wire fence with honeysuckle. Lantana (ham and eggs flowers).

There was an oak tree in back with cement stuck in it because the oak tree had died and where the limbs were gone were stuck in cement.

Pecan trees everywhere. The best pecans were the paper shell pecans. They were the long round corns.Daddy had his bowl of nuts and after every meal he would eat nuts. He used to walk around clipping his flowers and taking a slow watering hose around, leaving it on the plants for six hours for deep watering.

They had camellia bushes about too. There were wild yellow irises in the swamp and cattails and marsh grass.

Then they had the fountain in the front with our lady of Guadalupe. Mom had Louisiana irises planted about. They were blue. They had bamboo and oleanders and when we walked to the left we went through the oleanders. And we would try to cut the bamboo on the right for fishing poles but it wasn’t stiff enough.

St. Augustine broad leaf grass in the front.

Mama found some wild roses somewhere and she dug them up. And she planted them along the page wire fence in back.

Mama was always looking for someone who had scuppernong vines. When she was a child someone had them and they made muscatel.

There was a fig tree in back with low branches that the burrow Daddy bought us to ride as a kid used to
run under to throw us off.

There was a little stream in back that ran from the woods on the right all the way to Favre Lane.

The high woods had the pine and oak and the low woods had the cypress trees and the cypress knees.

Lots of possums. We used to watch them in the pond behind Mary’s house. Possums and raccoons. They raised their children on the island in the pond. We had an alligator in that pond and we watched him grow,to six feet.

The water was very very warm at the time of the hurricane about 90 degrees by the shore. One of the reasons the wild life didn’t survive was there was a drought.

There was an old alligator that lived in the swamp bigger than six feet. I don’t know what happened to him but he just disappeared.

The water had made more inroads. They had boats in the swamp. People paddled all around. Whether it was because people built more houses, there was a lot more water intrusion in the drainage areas. Twice Mary had 3 feet of water from a tropical storm under her house.

Hide tides and a tropical storm brought water in from the Gulf and swamps. The winds pushed the water into the swamps and land that bordered the swamps got flooded. Its scary because you don’t know when it’s going to stop and when it’s four feet you can’t get out. That was just for a tropical storm.

There were many more seagulls and brown pelicans. They roost all over.

Now there is a pollution advisory when they tell you not to swim. Mary thinks it’s the Dupont plant that is doing it. In the middle of the Bay St Louis Bridge to the far left is a chemical plant. It’s always been a problem. People have gotten more environmentally conscious and so they are measuring it.

There was a red algae in the pond for a while. It grew in the pond. We couldn’t get rid of it. Finally it just died and went away.

There was no sign except we hadn’t had a hurricane in a long tine and we were due.

After the hurricane there were no birds chirping for 2 years. You just take bird songs for granted in the country.

Sunrises in Waveland were the prettiest I’ve seen in the world.

Everything was exactly the way I wanted it: state of the art kitchen tile with blue herron behind my stove.

Sound of the birds missing before the hurricane.

I have a picture of a live heron and a dead one after the hurricane.

It was all the oil companies they built these canals to service their oil wells and these canals criss crossed the delta and came up and eroded the land and we lost more and more land every year. The eye didn’t pass over New Orleans it passed over Waveland. So it was marshland that was lost and it also was a very rich habitat for wild life.

We lived inside with the air-conditioning on 73 so you didn’t really notice the outdoors.

We had 15 ducks. We have adolescent ducks we grew from eggs. We evacuated with these ducks But we left them outside but they all got cold and winded and died.