Day 20 - Old Friends

I got a call from Jimmy Lamy Friday.

His wife and daughter are doing a crawfish boil Saturday afternoon and he asked me to come on over about three o’clock. I have to do an assessment of a home Saturday morning and I figure I’ll head over to Pearlington after I’m done.

This assessment is the home of a young family, the mom teaches and the husband is under some medical condition. She and her daughter live with family and the father lives where his medical condition can be managed. My objective, written loud and clear on the summary is to get her back into her home. I’ll tell you more about it later.

I spent the better part of two hours on the home and got back to my office about noon. After I took the time to write up as much of my observations as I could it was already almost three in the afternoon. I finished up and made the forty-minute drive over. The weather was great, it started in the low 60’s with a lot of sun. By noon it is over 70 but really low humidity and still no serious mosquitoes yet.

As I pulled into his drive way about four o’clock, regrettably late, I got a good view of the new roof we put on his house last May. Boy was that a hot three days! And there they were sitting by a table piled high with red-glistening crawfish, decorated with yellow and white buds, ears of boiled corn and garlic heads. His two sons, daughters and grand daughters were there as well as some cousins and acquaintances.

As you may know, you make a boil by soaking the crawfish, garlic heads, mushrooms, onions, bell peppers and brussel sprouts in a strong spicy seasoning (I think Beaudreaux’s crab boil is he one they use,) and then fire up the gas burner and boil until everything is done. Then you just pull up the strainer to drain then and pour it all out onto the brown paper on a table top.

After the introductions I picked around at three or four crawfish, (they really take more effort than they are worth to me) I got a couple of ears of corn, some green bell peppers and then worked over a couple heads of garlic and the white onions. THey really take up the seasoning. We sat around and talked, under the oaks.

It brought back memories of our farewell dinner on my first trip down (See Pearlington Diaries down in the blog). And , lo, who should drive up into the yard? Lizzie, our karaoke wizard. Her home was the first I worked on. She did not recognize me until I told her who I was. She has a good job now but still runs the karaoke at Turtle’s down on the bayou.

So things are getting better. But boy, the wounds are still there. Jimmy said if another one comes as bad as Katrina, he is moving out for good.