of the big brick mansion on the Gulf.
It’s dusk, and hot. Sky is blue gray, there’s dry moisture in the air, an occasional mosquito, no a horsefly whisps down an eyebrow. I want to go inside the mansion and see my mother. The light is on the second floor and I think I can see her at the dining room table where she plays cards. It’s a yellow light. The windows and shutter less and long like in old plantation houses. I think I see her shadow at the table. I’m imaging that she has gumbo waiting for me and a cold coke with ice. The big double door refrigerator in the kitchen should be stacked with cartons of red beans and rice, gumbo, and maybe if I’m lucky crawfish bisque with the thick lumpy spiced crawfish tasting a bit like crab and fish stuffed into the tails and floating in a cream tomato soup. I’m so hungry. Hungry to see them and hungry for food. Maybe even an old fashioned. Surely she is having one now and maybe snacking on toast and specied cheese or if I’m lucky budin sausage or caviar. I hear a wail from the dogs in the pen to the right of the mansion. They wail at dusk when the sky goes lavender as if by sobbing they could change the situation.
Out here it is beastly hot and the winding pat from the Gulf, strewn with thick lumpy oyster shells cracks under my feet. Oh how god awful. The more I walk the more weighted down I am by the air which is thick and greasy, and gnat filled and solid. I know a hurricane is coming. I’ve been dreaming about this. I can’t convince my mother. She has put so much time and money into that mansion and the walls are 12 foot thick. Nothing short of a tsunamis could knock it down. She sits on the 2nd floor, which is higher than any water from the gulf has ever reached in a storm.
The water behind me in the Gulf of Mexico is graying brown, mud like and nasty just a slight move to it, coffin colored and mucous thick.
And in my dream the water is exactly the same color, but it gets slowly higher the tides rising one inch at a time until the water strolls over the beach and up to the cement sea wall. Behind me I hear the rush of a car now and then. Are people leaving the coast for the city? Some cars drum their engines like race cars as they rush by though the speed limit is 20 miles an hour and police sometimes hide in dark patches of shrubbery and burst out and catch. There’s a lull sound to the water behind me. I don’t have to check to see if it’s changed. I couldn’t tell because the shore is over 200 feet behind me.
In my dream which I know will come true. It starts with a light rain which we are so grateful for. It’s been the hottest summer in history, the sharp grass alongside the path is now coarse and thick; patches of it protrude around the oyster shells. So in the dream it starts with a grey mist that gets thicker than a wind now and then between the oak trees, the deep fierce brandhes don’t budge but the leaves begin to murmur as if they want to squeal and dead leaves break loose and whisk across the grass and when you open the steel front door you have to really give it a shove because it doesn’t want to release itself. And then it doesn’t and dead leaves like starving baby mice blow inside.
And the question becomes should we drive in to the city via the escape route (Ah yes we have a special made driveway from the rear of the property out a back road Favre Lane where workers live whom we don’t know but who are sometimes drunk and belligerent. (Don’t walk too far away from the main house alone at night) So do we have enough gas in the Cadillac to get to that back road which is overgrown and could harbinger drunks or should we get in the Cadillac and cross over the Beach Road in front which is now covered with 2 inches of water and the waves from the Gulf are slapping across and getting stronger or should we not go to the city because New Orleans is below sea level and our house there is smaller and wasn’t built like this beach mansion on the Gulf of Mexico to outstrip any hurricane.
My mother is upstairs and another light goes on and I want to go inside and look out at the Gulf from the powerful second floor with its baby grand piano and oil paintings and sterling silver and Limoges china.
A hurricane can eliminate everything you know is real. A hurricane can create a new reality. My throat chokes—that could be a good thing. I sit in a wooden swing under s huge oak tree, a mama oak we called it as a child, and a scoop myself back on the swing and stick my legs out straight and let the nasty salt wind rip through me. There are lots of reasons to wish for change. The tedium of life in Mississippi for one. Every day hot and muggy, just getting to the car and not being attacked by mosquitoes or sweating through your clothes is victory. The sameness of I now it sounds crazy of a served breakfast of biscuits, bacon, gravy, and coffee, juice buttered rolls always at nine and always repeated conversation about money. There’a a big fear of new ideas and new people so you don’t want to meet any one in town who can’t be fully credentialed and how do you figure that out and lunch and dinner and evening snack always at the same time, always help laughing in the kitchen, the ones who are working are the happiest and Mama spends a lot of energy wanting to fill us up with the right things when I need to fill my mind and passions up with something bigger than this.
So as in punishment I stand out here knowing this nasty hurricane will come is coming but unable to voice my fear.
I’ve done a lot of research on the subject (though Mama insists it’s not table conversation) I have 3 websites that track hurricanes. And I read diaries of people who survived them on rooftops and in trees and in planes and in cars and in attics and in abandoned houses and in trains. But everyone agrees global warming and oil drilling in the gulf is killing off the herons and fish and even the sharks so the ecosystem Is messed up but what a I to do about this. What is one person to do about the marshes around the property that are drying up and the Gulf out front that keeps pulling in high tides.
I have this repeated dream that we’ve sold the house. Someone else lives in it and by mistake they aren’t there and I am allowed to go there and sleep for the night and I am so happy to be in the empty house though all my family are gone (dead or missing). The new owner has closed her eyes and allowed me to live in the house to reclaim it, as I am in grief that I allowed myself to sell it. How could I have betrayed this gorgeous house in my family for many generations by selling it? I must have been out of my mind.
I have to walk slow over the hard oyster shells, carefully to avoid the creepy crawly things that come out at night. Snakes crawl over grandma’s lawn escaping from the marshes looking for water. I don’t want to step on one of them. It’s so hot I can hardly breathe. Can I make it down the 200 feet of winding road that leads up and keeps expanding? Why am I alone? Am I dead? I have a big family all on this compound in Mississippi. Must be four cousins house just about. In Mississippi all the relatives collect around the matriarch for comfort prestige and money. Where is everybody? Has everybody already evacuated? Have they forgotten me? Oh god. I don’t want to die alone. But the light is on upstairs at Mama’s dining room table. Maybe she waited for me. My head feels thick my eyes fill with tears my lips are hot. I want life to stay the same. Even boring and flat. Oh god I can’t remember. Is this a holiday and are all the guys out on their boats. Is that it I hate boats. Normally the yachts are on trailers in the yard. Are pulled up on boat docks on the edge the property.
Everything is too flat I think I am caught in a dream hell in a space between living and death between hurricane and life. And the water definitely is rising behind me. I hear the cars rushing faster on the beach road, and the flailing of dogs in the pen, and my legs drip with sweat and I look up for the gold light at Mama’s dining room table, and it’s gone out. The house that was is black.
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