Plaques stand near each cabin, describing what slave life was like here on the plantation two hundred years ago. She’s included photocopies of original sales receipts when her ancestor bought or sold each slave. The documentation is striking and amazing.
How incredible is it that all of this was preserved and saved all of this time? It’s a true treasure for the family. How would it feel to belong to a history as vast and as old as this one? To know that no matter where you end up in the world, this is where you belong?
And maybe that’s what I’ve needed to figure out all along: where I belong. Because I’m just not sure. I never have felt like I truly belonged anywhere. I left New Orleans as soon as I could, but Denver wasn’t home any more than Louisiana was. And now that I’ve been back for a while, I thought that I was starting to feel like this is home, but I’m not sure. I still feel restless.
I wander through it all, soaking in the history, picturing how it must have looked then. When I find myself near the rose garden, I hear footsteps behind me and turn to find Declan’s mama coming out to join me.
“Hello, Mrs. Boudreaux,” I say with a smile.
“Oh, you can call me Mama,” she says with a chuckle. “Just about everyone does.”
“Thank you,” I reply as she takes my hand and walks beside me. Mama is a petite woman, like Gabby, with salt and pepper hair that she keeps in a short cut. Her makeup is perfectly done, and despite being easily in her sixties, she’s in excellent shape.
I like her.
“It’s a nice day for a walk,” she says and takes a deep breath. “The air always was fresher out here.”
“It’s a beautiful place,” I agree with a nod. “I’ve enjoyed being here.”
“It’s a good thinking spot,” she says. “And I expect you’ve had some thinkin’ to do.”
“I have.”
“Sometimes you can do too much thinkin’,” she says as we make our way through the garden and over a beautiful stone bridge that carries us over a creek. “You’ll just think your way into circles.”
“I might have done some of that too,” I reply with a laugh. We fall into an easy silence. I can tell that she wants to ask me questions, but she doesn’t push. Instead she points out places in the trees where her boys built tree houses in the summer, and where her husband proposed to her.
“He proposed out here?” I ask.
“He did. He courted me for a few months, and talked me into taking a drive out here to his family’s summer home. Walked me through the gardens, like we are now, although Gabby’s really brought them back to life. And then we sat under that magnolia tree and had a picnic lunch, and he asked me to marry him.”
“That’s sweet,” I murmur, picturing a younger woman sitting under the tree with her handsome man, him slipping a ring on her finger.
We walk just a bit farther, and we’re at the entrance to a cemetery, and I can’t help but feel sudden guilt. I haven’t been to either of my parents' graves.
And right now, in this moment with Declan’s sweet mother, I miss my own mama, and I wonder what advice she would give me about Declan and this whole mess.
“You can talk to me, you know,” Mama says as she sits on a bench, under an oak tree, and pats the seat beside her.
“Oh, I don’t know where to start.”
“I always find that the beginning is as good a place as any,” she says with a kind smile, and I find myself suddenly spilling all of it to her, about how Declan and I first met, how he would walk me to my car after work, helping him with his house, all the way through until this week and how confused I am.
She sits patiently, listening, nodding, and when I’m finished and wiping tears from my cheeks, she simply reaches over and grabs my hand in hers and squeezes gently, three times.
And that only makes me cry more.
“What?”
“Declan squeezes my hand like that.”
She smiles. “How lovely. Ask him what it means sometime.”