Winter comes to the South

After viewing this blog, our friend Gail Rayment emailed me yesterday saying, "What, no snow?" She may have meant this ironically, as in: must be nice not to have to cope with all the white stuff we're getting back home.  Or she may have been referring to the big winter storm that hit the South the last few days.

We didn't get it bad here (nothing like Atlanta), although there was a lot of wind, some sleet and freezing rain and the temperature went down to minus 4 C. one night.  And yes, there was a wee skiff of snow too.

While unpleasant and certainly unexpected,  it didn't seem like much to hardy Canucks used to (if sick of) winter in snow belt Ontario.  But in a land without salt trucks and snow tires (except ours!), it was a good call to close things down for a couple days.  Almost everything was shut.  As it was cold, nothing was open, and many of the roads closed -- and because we were more leery of other drivers than the weather conditions -- we stayed home (and played Rummikub in the bedroom, the warmest room in the house).  When we finally got out today for "supplies," the liquor store man, originally from Illinois, said he'd had to show people how to scrape ice off their cars and use the defrost to clear their windshields.  Poor Southerners.

Beauvoir

On the advice of our friend Thade Rachwal, yesterday we visited Beauvoir, an estate right on the coast a half hour east of Bay St. Louis, between Gulfport and Biloxi.

The house, built in 1848-52 as a summer house, was the home in the 1880s of the ex-president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis.  Before the Civil War Davis was a senator from Mississippi and had a plantation "upstate" near Natchez.  Hearing about his hard times after the war, the owner of Beauvoir, a professed admirer, invited him to come and live in one of the two small houses on the property.  Shortly after he bought the place.  The property was sold by Davis's widow to the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 1903 and they have owned it ever since.

We couldn't help notice similarities in form and features (although certainly not in size!) with a certain house we are more familiar with.

Beauvoir, described as a raised Louisiana Cottage, is essentially a large Ontario Cottage.  Raised -- partly to make it more impressive, but mainly to help with air circulation.  And instead of a back wing or tail, as is often found at home, it has two back wings on either side, so the plan is like a shallow "U" rather than a "T."

(My old friend Lynne DiStephano's long-awaited The Ontario Cottage: Perfect of Its Kind will doubtless explain the origins of this house form and how variations are found elsewhere.)

A striking presence on the property is the handsome Jefferson Davis Presidential Library, just opened last year.  The "Presidential" should really be in quotes -- it seems every American president, rebel or not, has to have a monumental library!

The two small houses or pavilions are perfectly matched and symmetrically placed on either side of the main house (they are reconstructions, the originals destroyed by Hurricane Katrina).  I made myself at home on the porch of one.

The main house was very, very badly damaged by Katrina.  Yikes!

Amazingly the house has been meticulously restored.  Here are some shots of the gorgeous interior.

Like so much of the antebellum South, the place evokes mixed emotions.  Reverence for the "Lost Cause" is especially tangible here.  This book, for sale in the gift shop, was one we could definitely pass up!

A Louisiana outing

Bay St. Louis, where we're staying, is not far from the Louisiana border.  Last Sunday we took a day trip to West Monroe, LA, curious to see the haunts of the Robertson family of Duck Dynasty fame (don't tell me you've never heard of them).

No, we didn't!  We went to Destrehan, LA instead.

This is the main house at Destrehan Plantation.  The house was built in 1790, when Louisiana was a Spanish colony, before Napoleon got it back in 1800 and then sold it to the Americans in 1803.  In the early nineteenth century wings on either side of the house were added and the colonnaded gallery; inside the house was remodelled in the Greek Revival style. 

Centre of main facade

Gallery of main facade

Centre of rear facade

The main facade faces the river road and, just across the levee, the Mississippi River.  The property was originally something like 6000 acres and, under the ownership of Jean Noel Destrehan and his family, became the largest sugar plantation in St. Charles Parish (in Louisiana a parish is equivalent to a county).

Many, many enslaved people toiled here of course, and we found it interesting that part of the Oscar-nominated movie Twelve Years a Slave, a truly harrowing story depicting the real (as opposed to honey-coated) face of slavery in the South, was filmed here, at the mule barn behind the house.

Destrehan Mule Barn

Just beyond the mule barn is a chain-link fence, and beyond that an oil refinery!  In an all-too-familiar story the plantation house was almost lost after an oil company acquired the property and let the place go to rack-and-ruin; but thanks to a group of volunteers, the River Road Historical Society, Destrehan was saved in the 1970s and, over many years, restored.  The society owns and operates the few acres left of the plantation, which include the main house and outbuildings (moved here from elsewhere, in an effort to recreate the plantation community) and some magnificent live oaks.

Oh, and one of the more unusual features of the house -- the water towers (two of course, symmetrically placed).  Echoes of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton?

What we like about the USA

A couple of our favourite things about living south of the border:

New Amsterdam Gin

I'm fond of the story how we drank the last of this kind of gin in Ontario.  We discovered New Amsterdam in the LCBO and it soon became our gin of choice.  It makes fabulous martinis, a staple in our household.  One day we went to the St. Marys LCBO and it wasn't on the shelf.  It had been discontinued, so I guess not everyone was so enamoured.  I complained to Ron, the store manager, and he said there was nothing he could do, it was a head office decision, etc… but he could see what remaining stock there was.  He ushered me into his office.  To my amazement he was able to check the inventory of NA gin in every store in the province and right then and there phoned those that still had some and said he had a customer.  So 20-plus bottles, all the remaining NA gin in Ontario, were sent to St. Marys!  We thought we'd have to pay for it all at once, but no, it was kept in a private area in the store and, as we needed it, I would go in and say "I'd like a bottle of our gin, please."

It won't surprise you to know that New Amsterdam gin is American, from NYC.  Since exhausting the supply in Ontario, we've had to rely on importing it, two bottles at a time (fortunately, Canada Customs does not ask how big the bottles are -- we love the 1.5 litre size).  We also have friends who have unselfishly brought us back gin from their US travels -- thank you Cathy and Bob!  (Others take note.)  No problem getting this Yankee gin here happily.

The Rachel Maddow Show

OK, this wouldn't be in Joey's favourites category.  He laughs at me but I adore Rachel Maddow.  She does talk a bit fast, about three times as fast as I do, but she's so smart, and funny too.  For those who are not au courant with US cable news shows she has a prime time slot on MSNBC and was described in the NY Times today as the network's star host.  MSNBC is the anti-Fox.

For Canadians, American politics is, as my friend Skip (aka Mary Lou) Evans says, a spectator sport; one I've become somewhat addicted to.  I really love to watch Rachel sticking it to the Republican and Tea Party types, whether it's about the rolling back of abortion rights, the restricting of voter rights or the fights over gay marriage.  Rachel, by the way, makes frequent reference to her female partner.

The juiciest thing lately has been the whole Chris Christie thing, which Rachel introduced last month as "a tale just too crazy to believe" and has been following doggedly ever since.  That a Republican governor of New Jersey, or at least his senior staff, would secretly order the shut-down of several lanes on the George Washington Bridge, the world's busiest, as part of some mysterious vendetta against a Democratic mayor (whose town was totally snarled with traffic for days as a result)… well, it's pretty crazy, like something from the fictional TV series House of Cards, and yet it's true.  (I confess I'm not a big fan of Christie since he vetoed a bill legalizing gay marriage in New Jersey.)

Here I can watch Rachel Maddow live every night (at home I can get her on podcast but a day late). Fortunately for Joey we have more than one TV.

Settling in

This is our cute little house in Bay St. Louis, home for the next six weeks.

It's late 1890s and was very sensitively restored after Hurricane Katrina, which devastated BSL in August 2005.  Although the house is several blocks from the Gulf of Mexico, it was flooded by the storm surge wrought by the hurricane.  On the archway separating the kitchen and dining room is a small "Katrina plaque" showing the high water line of the inundation.  It's a good yard off the floor!

On arrival our landlady, Nikki, showed us around, gave us the key and some brochures, and was gone before we knew it (she runs a B&B a few blocks away).  We were impressed that she didn't come back an hour or so later to "see how y'all are doing," i.e. check to make sure we hadn't cleaned out the place, as happened to us once in Savannah (or maybe that's just what we thought -- mistrustful northerners!).

It's certainly a very friendly, laid back place, with its own quirks.  The next morning we dutifully walked over to the tourist office where we were met at the door by Susan, who works there, with a treat for Isabel.  The office is housed in the old Bay St. Louis Train Depot, a mission-style building from the 1870s that is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

The third photo shows the lovely pavilion behind the station from which you entrain/disembark.  Although not any more.  But the depot is on the main coastal line and we hear the sound of train whistles and rumbling several times a day.  Like St. Marys but a lot closer and more frequent.

But back inside: the tourist office doubles as a sort of Mardi Gras museum.  It seems BSL has its own Mardi Gras parade and celebration and some of the more flamboyant costumes are on display.  And maybe it's just the time of year -- they're getting ready -- but they even let you wear them!

Along with Susan we also met Jimmy, who happened to be stopping by.  He works in the town's "beautification" department and was wearing a sort of uniform that said as much (forget the MG headdress, I'd like one of those!).  Both of them gave us their phone numbers and said to call any time. I think it had to be the friendliest reception we're received anywhere, and said as much on the comment card by the door on our way out.  The next day we heard from Nikki that she had been to a tourism development meeting where they had read out our comments and people were thrilled.  Typical small town.

We arrive in Bay St. Louis, under a cloud

We arrived in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, Monday afternoon, after three days on the road.  It was not a great trip.  The weather en route was alternately foggy (we left during a "warm" spell), sunny and quite rainy; things were sopping when we pulled in about 3 pm Central Time.

But the weather was not the problem.  On Sunday, the second day, before we left Cincinnati, we received the shocking news that our close friend Pat Malicki was in critical condition in a Detroit hospital as a result of a fire at her house in Windsor.  This hung over us all day.  In Birmingham, Alabama, that evening we heard from a mutual friend in Windsor who had been to see Pat in the hospital -- first confirming the extent of her injuries, and then, not much later, that she had died from them.  We were devastated.  We had had a long phone conversation (there was no other kind) with Pat just a few days before and she had spent several days with us in St. Marys last summer.  We had known her through the ACO (Architectural Conservancy of Ontario) for years and became even closer to her after the sudden death of her husband, Richard, in early 2012, not even two years ago.

Here is Pat and Richard, whom we also loved, with me at my retirement party in late 2010.

The long-time president of the Windsor Region Branch of ACO, Pat also served a term or two as president of the provincial organization.  She was a preservationist force to be reckoned with and didn't suffer fools (political or otherwise) gladly.  She had strong opinions and loved her vodka-on-the-rocks and cigarettes.  She was a great friend to Joey and me.