Seeking Serenity

Upon our return to the holler after twenty-four hours in Atlanta, I immediately headed over to touch base with very stable Mamie and her ever-changing garden. I needed to ground myself. (I don’t know if that pun was intended.)

I’ve never been one to embrace sameness, so it may seem impossible that I’ll ever feel like I belong in slow-moving Coker Creek. You’ve heard of the “slow food” movement created in response to the fast food culture. Coker Creek could be a poster child for a “slow life” movement.

This year, I’m coming to grips with the need to celebrate the moment by fully embracing each process that the moment offers. I’m attempting to heed the admonition of my friend Dot, “Take it easy, Greasy. You have a long way to slide.”

I married at eighteen. My honeymoon was in a primitive fishing camp in the middle of a south Louisiana bayou. We had no electricity, no plumbing, and no other people for miles around. I, who had always insisted to my grandma that I could never live close to her on the bayou because it would be too boring, cried all the way back to civilization. My very stable new husband insisted that we had to live in the city for him to make a living.

When my very stable mother-in-law died at age fifty-six, I became convinced that I’d be long dead by age sixty. I was only nineteen years old when I added this to my long line of magical thoughts. My husband and I were also expecting our first child.
I tried to settle into the life of a young wife and mother in a tiny brick house in the suburbs without even one tree in the back yard. Every day was the same: Change the baby’s diaper; make my husband’s lunch; do the laundry; clean the house; make supper; watch the news; go to bed. Wake up and repeat.

The best times were with my neighbors, but my husband didn’t particularly like their husbands. And then, my seemingly stable neighbors started dropping like flies.
Peggy moved back to her bayou home and family. Merline took to her bed with a major depression when her husband had to leave the state to find stone mason work. Gayle had a meltdown after she had her third child. The only stability seemed to be at my house, but the solitude and sameness were killing my soul.

Sybil, a single labor and delivery nurse and the only faithful visitor at my dying mother-in-law’s bedside, had worked many years with my mother-in-law. She became my daughter’s godmother, and took me and Rachel under her wing. Sybil could see that I needed a hobby. She began introducing me and my infant daughter to the finer man-made things in life.

We took Rachel in her stroller to Antoine’s and Brennan’s, and all the better New Orleans restaurants. Sybil encouraged me to learn gourmet cooking, buying me my first gourmet cookbook, The New Orleans Restaurant Cookbook, and teaching me cooking techniques in her tiny French Quarter apartment kitchen. Sybil would attend our many parties, bearing fine wine and Waterford crystal goblets for me and my husband, and hand-smocked Polly Flinders party dresses and Madame Alexander dolls for our little princess. She was our very own fairy godmother.

After my second child, Scott, was born, I was no longer ever-laughing and fun. Sybil insisted that I go to her therapist because she thought I was depressed. Her therapist was incompetent. Sybil got married, and I got divorced. I was on my own without a compass.

Oh boy, what a wild ride ensued to “find myself”. I began living in overdrive. Life became one big adventure, and I became “hell bent” to experience all the adventure I could without doing myself or others bodily harm.

I tried different New Orleans neighborhoods, and different Atlanta neighborhoods -- even moving to a couple of Tennessee cities for a short time. I worked at different jobs, and opened several businesses. I began and ended many relationships. I still hadn’t located me.

It seems that the only thing that soothed me was immersion in nature. Nature never bores me because, if you watch very closely, nothing in nature is in straight lines or perfect circles. And constant changes, large and small, are nature’s norm. Every chance I got, I’d pack a bag and take the kids to the woods or the water.

After another failed stab at stability, I finally moved back to New Orleans . Through grace, I managed to marry Richard in time to have my first grandchild. We lived in a brick house in a suburb named Tall Timbers. At least we had trees in our yard. Then Richard became a candidate for a heart transplant.

When Richard’s near-death disabled him, I insisted that we run to the arms of nature. I had found the setting to sooth my savage soul a marsh on Lake Pontchartrain in south Louisiana. When Hurricane Katrina gave Louisiana a nervous breakdown, our earthly Eden was erased.

We were seriously downsized. Time to hit the open road, footloose and family- free. We traveled the southern United States in an RV for nine months. Every evening a different natural-setting campground welcomed us home. We had no neighbors, but kept in frequent communication with our family and friends. We also spent weeks at a time in the New Orleans area, assisting our loved ones left digging through the lost cities of Louisiana.

I vowed never to try settling down again. But Richard, who had grown up in a rural agricultural environment, had different ideas. He wanted a home above sea level. We bought eight and a half acres at sixteen hundred feet elevation, with a house and two creeks, in a cradle of trees, in the Cherokee National Forest.

I’m now trying to acclimate to the rhythms of nature in the mountains and the pace of the people of the land. There’s a song with the lyrics “I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me.” I have been to me, but I kept trying to add more and more to me. I now think that paradise is where we find it. I’ve decided to savor the moment and get comfortable with me – whoever I may be.

Very stable Coker Creek seems to be a good place to begin.