Louisiana, TSA and a disembodied hand, kitchen

Ok, y'all, I was gone and then I returned and now I'm sort of gone again, but I had to check in, not least to tell you a funny tale.

Last Friday morning, before the sun was up, I flew to Louisiana for a quick visit. My sister, who as you probably know lives in Italy, had been in the Dominican Republic with her Italian family for a vacation. When they returned to Florence, she and her children (my nephew, Leone, and new niece, Virginia) flew to Louisiana to see my parents. I just had to take advantage of our being in the same country to see Elia and Leone and meet Virginia. 

Virginia and Leone have the same birthday. She is four months old and he's that plus three years. I'd not seen Leone or Elia since last August, so really, being home was such a treat in so many ways. Not least because there was no snow in Louisiana nor any fumes from floors being refinished. And because crawfish season is terrific and fun. 

Naturally, because there was a new baby, we had many visitors over the weekend. One, Mom's dear friend Susan, has known my boys for years now. She is well aware that he is fairly obsessed with what some might call junk but which he calls treasure. And because she runs a museum and the warehouse next door, she has been able to indulge Oliver's treasure-hunting desire by letting him putter around inside the cavernous store. 

Susan came bearing gifts, including a few from the warehouse. One was as perfect as they come: a disembodied mannequin hand missing the top knuckle from its middle finger. Susan thought she'd found the missing piece and so into the box threw that digit. However, that turned out to be a lady's finger with a pink-painted nail, no match for the thick masculinity of the hand.

Everyone in the room about fell out, and I could not wait to bestow these gems upon Oliver. I packed them carefully in a box and nestled that inside my carry-on, sort of forgetting that the Lake Charles Regional Airport is quite possibly the most stringent, nit-picky, rule-following airport in all the world.

This morning as Mom and Elia watched me attempt to go through security, they were first surprised when I was told to step aside for a pat down because the back of my skull showed up in suspicious code-yellow on the security monitor. I wasn't even wearing a ponytail.

While I waited for a female agent to administer my head search, my carry-on bag set off the x-ray alert as it passed through the scanning tunnel.

"Ma'am, we need to search your bag."
"No problem," I replied, thinking that the hand probably looked a little weird on the scanner.
"Do you have anything fragile or sharp in here?"
"Well, I do have a St. Patrick's Day-themed Garden Gnome for my son who both happens to love gnomes and trolls and was born on St. Patrick's Day. His hat is sharp, and he's breakable." It also happens that the leprechaun gnome is puking a rainbow into a pot of gold which is obviously one of the reasons I bought it for Oliver.

"Anything else?"
"I also have, and this is going to sound weird, a hand in a box and a loose finger too. It's from a mannequin. My son likes weird things."

THANK GOD this occurred in Louisiana, y'all, because had I been, say, in Iowa, I am just not sure this all would have gone over as well.

Comments from the TSA agents (who, by the way, had felt my head and declared me safe) during the good ten minutes all this took:
"Well, I'll be. Look at this hand."
"If you need a hand, you don't need to look far."
"Can I give you a hand?"
"Give yourselves a hand for finding this!"

Meanwhile, Mom and Elia are on the other side of the glass, and we are all texting back and forth furiously and trying not to literally fall on the floor or be too obvious about the hysterics we were in. 

"Ma'am, I'm going to let you pack these items back up," one agent said, and as I found out later, before I approached the examination bench to repackage the barfing gnome, severed hand, and dissonantly delicate but also severed finger, Mom snapped this photo.

I was, not surprisingly, the last to board the plane. And we have all been laughing all day. Oliver, needless to say, is thrilled with his treasures. I'm just glad they all made it home safely.

***

We are finally in the homestretch with the renovation. Due to my ordering knobs but only finding out they are backordered UNTIL JUNE when I called to ask why they'd not yet shipped (the customer service rep said, "Would you like me to check our stores for you to see if they can fulfill your order?" Um, YES! Then she said, "I'm so glad you checked." And I am still thinking "Wasn't it your job to let me know of said backorder?" but whatever), I only have twelve of the fifteen I need but should be made whole soon. 

All the painting is done, the backsplash is nearly complete, all but one light is in, the appliances work, and the floors are looking great. 

The kids and I moved into a friend's house tonight (T home in our basement with Nutmeg) as we cannot access our bedrooms this week because of the refinishing and will move home on Saturday, just in time for Oliver's birthday. 

For now I'm off to bed. Sleep well, friends. 

Home

I was born in Augusta, GA, just a couple months before my dad completed med school. He and my mom (she had a hell of a tough time moving from New Orleans to "Disgusta"), lived in the servants quarters of a beautiful, old mansion; the kind your mind conjures if you hear someone utter "old-school, monied Georgia home." They loved living in that home, loved and came to know the family who built the beauty, and in fact started musing about their very own dreamhouse while there as the family's younger son was an accomplished architect. I've always enjoyed thinking about their hopes and dreams as a newlywed couple. They had no money but they still, together, envisioned the sort of place they hoped they might someday be able to build. When I wasn't even six months old, we moved to Mobile, a city just as southern as was Augusta. Dad was to start his residency there, and Mom and Dad found a tiny house in Springhill, a lovely neighborhood near the university. My sister, Elia, was born in Mobile, and though my memories are vague - the sort I don't totally trust because they could just as easily be others' stories told to me repeatedly over the years as they could my very own recollections- I have some sense of life there. I had a good friend named Kimby, Mom and I did lots of puzzles, Hurricane Frederic wasted Mobile, I have a faint scar on my right ankle that I swear came from a jagged piece of aluminum on a fence in our yard, I went to a Montessori school and my teacher was Ms. Fink.

A few years later, it was on to -and for my mom, back to- Lake Charles, a medium-sized town in Southwest Louisiana where she'd been born and raised. Mom never planned to return to Lake Charles, but Dad was busy with a full practice, and she had the two of us little ones; the thought of having her parents nearby was compelling to say the least. I can certainly understand.

And so Lake Charles became our home and is to this day, the place Mom, Elia and I call our hometown: grade school, high school, first jobs, first boyfriends; we were all married here; this is where we return when we're "going home."

During their first years back here, Mom and Dad brought their dreamhouse ideas to fruition in blueprint form. Al, the architect from Augusta, drew up the plans, and slowly, as they could afford to, they made their way to the reality. First they bought a plot of land on Contraband Bayou. Do y'all know what a bayou is? For those who don't, it's a small waterway that often branches off from a larger body, like a lake or river. It's more substantial than a creek or stream but definitely not on par with a real river. I like the way Wikipedia describes bayou, so if you're so inclined, you can read more via this link. Bayous run throughout the Gulf Coast region and in my opinion, they plus marshes are what makes Louisiana coast-land so hauntingly beautiful and unique.

If you head East on I-10 from Lake Charles to New Orleans, you'll drive over the Atchafalaya Swamp Freeway which is, perhaps, my favorite thing in Louisiana. Basically, the freeway is a many-mile (15? 20?) bridge that seems to hover just above the swamp. Cypress stumps and knees spot the water like it's got a serious case of measles, egrets swoop down for a quick meal of fish, sometimes tiny boats of fisherman have set up camp, rods at the ready. And still you drive, mile after mile. If you're lucky, you'll do this in the evening with a full moon hanging heavy in the sky, as if it's stuffed with catfish and bread pudding, happy and full.

For years, we tended our plot on the bayou, and one day Mom and Dad were able to put in a boat slip and wharf. We lived just one street over and would come visit our bare land with the beautiful, sturdy wharf keeping bayou wakes at bay. My parents nailed each board to the foundation themselves.

When we came to ski, Mom would beam with pride over the speedboat she'd always wanted, and we, our familial team, would pack it up: skis, vests, water, sunscreen, gas money, sunglasses, an oar just in case. She and Dad would take us to the Lake or to English Bayou, a glassy-smooth waterway that was often the cat's meow for good skiing.

Mom would slalom with the purest joy, then Dad would don his single ski and jump the wake back and forth like a fish. One day he came so close to the wooden barriers surrounding a support column of a bridge that we all gasped in terror. Mom had made these hilarious, laminated signs that she stored under the boat seat cushions: one said, "Alligator in your wake;" another something like "Check your nose- boogar." I can't remember but even though we always knew they'd emerge, we still laughed. And laughed hard.

Elia was so tiny when she was young that we had to tie her skis together because they weighed as much as she did and her little legs couldn't hold them in parallel until she was up. She was a champ though and soon slaloming with the best of them. I was always the nerdy holdout, scared of speed, nervous about whatever. I never could slalom but I had a good time on two skis; I still do.

When I was a junior in high school, Mom and Dad's dream came true. The foundation of the house was laid, and for the next year, we watched it rise, just as it had two-dimensionally on Al's beautiful plans. It was finished just weeks before my senior prom, and Mom and Dad made dinner on the back porches for 16 or so of us here that night. All the women were clad in floor-length white satin gowns, the guys in tuxes. And I sat on that very porch tonight, 19 years later, sipping a glass of wine and looking out over Contraband Bayou for the umpteenth time.

I wish I'd appreciated it all differently, more, when I was younger. That's the crappiest part of youth: what you do and should appreciate are too often worlds apart. Yet something stuck, and much of growing up here is what I draw on now, when I look to my core and seek to find and honor my truest self. I am so happy that my boys are in some ways, growing up here too. That they have both DC and South Louisiana to reference as they mature and shape themselves. They're sound asleep right now, and I'm heading in that direction too. Good night all.