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White Egret in the Shallows
Tales
of Living in a Beach House on the Gulf Coast
by Paul Estronza La Violette
Illustrated by Patricia Rigney
165 pp
$19.95 Hardback with Dust Jacket
©
2005 by Paul Estronza La Violette
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WHITE EGRET IN THE SHALLOWS
Tales of Living in a Beach House on the Gulf
Coast
| Paul Estronza La Violette |
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Things are changing.
This book is the fourth book I have written about the life I
and my wife, Stella, have led living in a small Mississippi
town on the Gulf of Mexico. We've done this in the pleasant
company of local friends, a series of large dogs, a black cat,
and all the wonders that come with living in a beach house in
a southern coastal town.
Preface to Egret in the Shallows
The words above open my new book, White Egret in
the Shallows. They were written while Stella and
I were up on her farm in Pennsylvania, with late December snow
covering the long steep driveway, the temperature in the teens
and the wind whistling around the old farmhouse.
However, the original preface did not contain that first sentence,
things are changing. On that Sunday in August of last
year when Stella and I had packed Holly, our black Tomcat, an
old laptop, clothes for three days in the car and fled the coming
storm, the book was essentially finished in a separate file
on the laptop.
Months later as I sat by the wintry window of the Pennsylvania farmhouse and reread the finished text, I realized that a revision was needed.
I realized that what I had written described a golden era, a wondrous time, a time that no longer existed. I began to slightly alter the book making my revisions as unobtrusively as possible; in fact in the whole book, Katrina is only mentioned twice, and these two times in the next to last chapter (the last chapter is actually an epilogue).
I left the stories much as they were, leaving them to reveal the wonderfully rich ambiance of Gulf Coast living. I did with my changes, however, reorient them slightly to show the slow social changes (condominiums, casinos, shrimping decline, etc) that have been taken place on the coast prior to the storm and finally in the last two chapters, the stark emotional damage of the storm's aftermath.
When I was through, I found I had written a book about Katrina. Not with graphic pictures of the storm's horror and the aftermath of brutal debris and confused, almost criminal mismanagement, but a more important intangible loss. I had described a wondrous style of life that, with its passage, Katrina had taken from all of us that lived in the devastated small coastal towns of southern Mississippi.
It is a book to be enjoyed but to remember as you turn the pages that what you are reading is not about now but about the way things were.
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