Where
the Blue Herons Dance
New Tales from the Gulf Coast
by Paul Estronza La Violette
Illustrated by Patricia Rigney
165 pp
$19.95 Hardback with Dust Jacket
© 2001 by Paul Estronza La Violette
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Preface
Its' cold today.
A massive thrust of cold Canadian air has reached south all the way to the Gulf Coast. Just to our north, ice storms have closed roads and caused large scale power outages to broad areas of the mid-west.
It's nothing like that here, but it is cold. This morning, we woke up to temperatures in the mid-twenties This is unusual for us.
I'm walking on the beach in front of our house in the morning light of winter sun with Jennie, our Weimaraner. I don't have to yell at her to stay out of the cold water of the Mississippi Sound; one slight toe dip and she does this bit of thinking on her own.
She loves the beach and the exulted feeling of freedom presented by it's open spaces. She races ahead of me at top speed in broad circles, shedding some of the excess energy that she has accumulated from being cooped in the house these last three rainy days.
There are no birds on the beach for her to chase -- I suppose it's either too cold or too early or both -- and Jennie has to make up imaginary purposes for her racing circles. She seems to be doing this very well.
Up toward the house but still on the beach, I see Holly, our black tomcat, sitting in front of a long row tall beach grass. He's watching us. He wants to join us, but is leery of the wide openness of the beach. Instinct tell him that if something came up, he'd never be able to get to a safe cover.
As a cat he worries about things like that.
The beach grass was planted in two long rows to slow the wind-induced migration of the sand onto a country road that runs alongside the beach. The grass is quite tall and Holly will be able to follow along with us as we walk, making a parallel path through the rows of duned grass.
It's interesting that he lags behind us as we walk away from the house; the distance of his lag increases as we get further and further away from the house. He gets nervous in unfamiliar territory. Jennie doesn't lag; she continues her endless looping and sniffing, ranging always a way ahead of me.
When I finally turn to go back to the house, all this will be reversed. Holly will lead our way, dashing in short runs ahead of me. Jennie will be the one lagging behind.
My wife, Stella, is in the house, which lies just on the other side of the road. It is Saturday, and she is trying to play catch up. During the week, she works for a Navy facility located twenty-five miles away. Weekends are the best time for her to do her part of the household chores we share. Mostly it's baking, which she likes, and laundry, which she doesn't.
I would rather she were here with us walking in the bright clearness of this Saturday morning, feeling the slow heating of the sand, watching Jennie in her broad racing circles and laughing at the black blob that is Holly peering at us like a voyeur from between clumps of grass.
I'm luckier than Stella. The office where I do my writing and consulting work (I'm a marine scientist with my own company) is in the back and to one side of the house. The office has a large window with a view of the beach and I have the option of getting up whenever I like and go walking with Jennie and Holly.
Let me describe to you where Stella and I and Jennie and Holly live. It will help explain much about what I have written in this book.
We live on the beach of a small town, one of a number of small towns that border the Mississippi Sound. We've lived here all of our married lives, a little more than twenty-five years.
It's a friendly town that, while feeling the effects of the booming casino and tourist industries that has changed so much of the other coastal towns, has managed to retain much of it's relaxed charm. Still things are changing.
The Mississippi Sound is a shallow estuary, seldom deeper than 20 feet, that stretches about a hundred miles along the entire southern Mississippi Coast as well as a small bit of Alabama's. It's narrow along it's east - west length, averaging about fifteen miles in width.
This long, shallow body of water separates the Mississippi Coast from the clear blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It forms a richly diverse, very active mixing zone for the fresh waters that pour out of the coastal rivers and lakes and the more salty waters of the Gulf. This variable mixing gives the waters of the Sound a brownish color and is the source of the regions rich bounty of shrimp, of flounder, of redfish, and oysters.
In the early morning hours of summer weekends, Stella often dips into this bounty by wade fishing in front of the house. It's a pleasant diversion for her and a source of some very good eating me. What she catches gives us a late breakfast or early lunch. My favorite is black drum, grilled with a couple of eggs, onions and fresh French bread. If I am lucky, there may be even a little roe to mix with the eggs.
I love to eat these meals sitting at our table in the dining room looking out through the large windows over the broad sun bright waters of the Sound. In front of me would be a cool glass of dark beer.
Under the table Jennie would be waiting for something to fall.
It's not always cold here on the Coast as it is today. In fact it seldom gets this cold even in winter. Normally, it's rather pleasant, although in the long summer it can, at times, be terribly humid and hot.
I talk about that pleasantness in this book as well as the heat. One gets used to the heat here in the same way people in Minneapolis get used to the cold. As there are periods in the year in Minneapolis during which locals prefers to stay inside in houses built for the cold, there are periods that we who live on the Coast prefer to stay inside houses built for the heat.
But rather than the snow and ice they have to view through their windows, we can look at moss draped live oaks, a long sandy beach and the broad sweep of the waters of the Mississippi Sound.
If I had to choose, I would pick our view over theirs.
In this book. I present vignettes of the twenty-five years my wife and I and companions such as Jennie and Holly have lived bordering the beach and Sound in a large comfortable house that Stella and I helped design and build. The house sprawls among several live oaks, several of which were here in 1814 when the British rowed by in their failed attempt to capture New Orleans.
To catch the breezes, there is a wide, covered veranda that stretches around the south and west sides of the house and provides us with a place to relax and watch the beach and Sound as well as the birds, animals, fish, and people that work and play on these. It is indeed a nice place to live and I will try to give you a flavor of it in this book.
At Heron Home
Waveland, Mississippi
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