 |
|
|
|
Members and Friends of OUUC,
This in another piece written by Karin Giger who wrote the description of Life in New Orleans, Jan. 30, 2006 that was sent out earlier. This is about what was to be her and her husband's retirement home in Pass Christian, MS on the Gulf Coast.
********************************************************************************
I am so proud of you and your fellow Unitarians for the wonderful help you are providing to Louisianans. knowing that there is caring and support all across America means a great deal to us.
Please do feel free to share both those pieces I wrote with as many folks as you like. I am attaching a more recently revised version of the Ghost Walking piece...it just reads a little better now, so if it's being forwarded this much, it may as well be the improved version.
Thanks from us all for all that you are doing. Karin Giger
GHOST WALKING
I've become a ghost in my own home. Each night I travel from room to room, opening kitchen cabinets, sifting through closets and cataloging book shelves. I scan table tops and survey pictures on the walls. Half asleep, I'm on a mission: to list the contents of our Katrina obliterated house for the insurance adjustor. Inventories flood my night worries…don't forget the sheets, the beach towels, the CD's, the waffle iron. It is an eerie task. Half awake, visualizing each tableau, I memorize the carefully folded table cloths from Italy, the embroidered napkins from Portugal. It is painful to imagine them tangled in the treetops of Pass Christian, the quiet Gulf Coast town where we built our dream house just 14 months ago.
And how do I reduce to dollar value the oil painting in the dining room? The original art for an August 1940 Saturday Evening Post cover, it once hung in my parents modest Jersey shore cottage. In brilliant orange and chartreuse, the painting illustrated a halter clad woman sunbathing on a city rooftop, her newspaper opened to the headline "Crowds leave town". For the past year, it lived companionably above my beloved mother in law's French provincial buffet.
I linger in the dining room, with its round old fruitwood table. The iron and painted wood chandelier was from the late New Orleans antique dealer Henry Stern. The walls and ceiling were Linen White tongue and groove, mounted horizontally. Dreamily, seamlessly, I move away from the listing of serving spoons, to joining the circle of friends drinking Meursault and laughing over grilled lamb in that lovely room. I watch Augie, the six toed Maine coon cat, leap from counter to counter, knocking over flowers and sneaking cheese. The tangible items made more real by my memories of how well loved they were. Objects imbued with the essence of family.
Morning conjures up sunnier memories. Shafts of light crossing pale blonde bamboo floors. The reflection of adagio grasses on the surface of the salt water pool, and beyond, Bayou Mallini sparkling. The front porch filling with newspapers and music, and friends sipping coffee under ceiling fans. Days spent reading in hammocks, gathering Chilton County peaches for cobbler, marinating vegetables, cooking a mess of fish. Pink and turquoise clouds above sunset cruises on Bay St. Louis.
The travel mementos…the stool from Montana, the table runner from Sweden, shells from Corfu, the Nantucket lightship basket, paper mache chickens from San Miguel…all, flown the coop. The huge exuberant rug patterned after a fuscia and cream Housetop quilt by the women of Gee's Bend, Alabama. An old enamel sign with its hundred year old lighthouse logo for the Hancock Bank. The ping pong table. A yellowed pulldown school room map of Louisiana, dated 1954. The cobalt colored bowl my younger son made in summer camp, the clock his brother gave me for Mother's Day. On a wooden hall peg, I see my father's tan McGregor walking-on-the-beach jacket, circa 1963. All, gone.
We had spent the past two years designing and supervising construction of this dream house. Such unexpected pleasure, working with our contractor and his family of craftsmen, whose standards and care inspired us. Then furnishing it with new, inherited, and vintage treasures. Contemporary art punctuated the space. Larry's old Warhol Chairman Mao, an enormous Solitario painting of thunderclouds over the Mississippi River, a small Walter Anderson print of bathing on the Gulf Coast. My Marimekko on the bayou.
We named the place The Amen Corner. A convergence of meanings…the 12 th hole of the Augusta National Golf Course, an homage to our deeply religious builder, the expression my father in law used at especially happy family gatherings, "Now we're really in the Amen Corner".
Just two fires ever warmed this house. The raised hearth was backdrop for a friend's Christmas card, as we built the inaugural blaze last Thanksgiving. Another night a friend and I played Scrabble, creating increasingly silly words as we drank wine by firelight.
The next pleasure came with months of planning and installing landscaping. Two hundred native grasses, antique roses, and Natchez white crape myrtle trees. The pink rambler, a cutting from a pal, climbing through the scarcely weathered fence. It was fertilized with the ashes of our legendary mutt, Rex. From the new screened porch, our eyes could follow Rex's successor Bruno, his happy tail weaving a path through the garden. All suffuse my memory of a year of joy in our weekend/ambling-towards-retirement home in Pass Christian.
When I moved south, 27 years ago, a Yankee from Boston and New Jersey, I was struck by my husband's relatives talking about "before the war" and "after the war". Hurricane Katrina will be that demarcation point for the people of the Gulf Coast.
Eventually my nighttime rambles through the house subside. The restless cataloguing in my mind finally slows as simple objects are now relegated to paper. The inventory is complete, sent on to the insurance adjustor.
What is left: bright flashes of laughter and conversation; a beautiful intimacy with my husband; friends and family all sharing in the warmth of this house we created with love.
The memories are not waterlogged images of the debris, the sadness and loss. They are vivid snapshots of our short happy life at The Amen Corner.
Karin Giger
October, 2005
|
|
