My daughters recently returned from a month long stay in their Utopia, a veritable Shangri La whose center sits as lovely to their eyes as the lamasery in the form of my parents’ home. Louisiana holds all that is dear to them: adoring grandparents, cousins eager to play, spicy seafood dishes and a host of sultry, colorful establishments that their small mountain city could not conjure if it tried. Each live oak or green oak (their namesake) beckons them with sweeping arms, its temptress branches bow, sometimes as deep as to touch the sandy ground beneath the tree’s shade allowing the children to simply walk up its outstretched arms and into its lap amid hanging Spanish moss. These long lost relatives pop of everywhere, as close as in their Granny and Pepere’s yard and nearly everywhere they visit. They sit in the shade of the trees to eat snowballs on the north side of the lake while the water laps nearby and eye with awe the various alleys that mark earlier times of wealth and slavery along the wide, murky river, where their Pepere , aged five, fished alone. They pose in front of the city’s oldest trees in the park that leads to the precious carousel that celebrated their great-grandparents’, grandparents’ parents’ and now their own youths.

The girls eat with relish an order of beignets and café au lait oblivious to the collection of sweat beads on their noses and foreheads or the dampness that settled into shirts and shorts gluing them to their skin. Across the street they are greeted by the rush of air-conditioning and art in the gallery on the square where they find their aunt anticipating their arrival. They want to visit and revisit the cathedral where their parents were married, follow the paved path along the river to look back at their favorite city or to watch foreign barges and ships. Miren knows many of the shops and is known in a particular doll shop. Lise delves into easy conversations on the streetcar, the tourists behind her, the locals next to her, the car filling and emptying as she rides from end to end of the line.

Together with an eager Granny they devour all of the charm the city and its environs offers and see nothing else save for an empty building or an eerily abandoned block that draws a retelling of Katrina. They accept the slow meandering recovery as befitting to the place and celebrate the return of city favorites with exuberance: “Let’s eat gelato at Brocato’s and take the canolis home!”
Other days find them in a local marsh marveling at the abundant life looming in the water below. Lise counts the crabs that she spots within two board lengths of the boardwalk they are traversing and Miren points to lanky birds that tiptoe elegantly through the shallows on the grassy edges of the water. Pepere knows the names of the birds in the marshes and swamps as well as the ones that fill the back yard to visit the variety of feeders and trees around where the children like to swing. He draws their eyes to a colored breast or a brilliant wing and explains the differences in blue birds with visual aids.

The undulation of rooms in their Granny and Pepere’s house seems duly appropriated to the family activities that are housed in each one. The small room behind the kitchen whose cabinet doors and bench drawers conceal an array of toys whose timeline of origin spans some forty something years caters to the younger grandchildren. Private spaces and open spaces for lively and lengthy plays put on by whatever grandchildren are present abound and such spaces for the mounding of and surrounding for the consumption of boiled seafood punctuates the haven that is Granny and Pepere’s home.

My visit, disrupting my daughters’, forces me to see the place where I grew up through new eyes. Painful parts of my youth that once fogged its simple joys are erased in the unobstructed pleasures of my children. Though I am taken aback each time I arrive at my parents’ and open the car door to the thick, moist heat that almost sucks the breath out of me, I now, even in summer, marvel at the place that I once called home that holds so large a place in my children’s hearts. Because of this I can enjoy a day, even in record-breaking heat, as Rem, with a two year-old’s supply of inexhaustible energy, runs from one shade seeking animal to another to point out the wonders housed amid the old deep red-bricked buildings of the Audubon Zoo as my mother and I trail behind.