Ceil Lanaux and her family have so many connections with ours that I'll just name one: her son Elliott brought me a load of sugar cane a few days ago for smoking my Thanksgiving turkeys. He cut it down at the vast Glendale Plantation, which the Lanaux family owns. And where a casual second-string family Thanksgiving feast was planned for this afternoon.
Since we were headed that way, Mary Ann thought it would be fun to pay a visit to Houmas House Plantation. Owner Kevin Kelly is wrapping up a particularly large program of improvements to the historic sugar plantation. He has been asking us to come by and take a look. Besides, Jude's girlfriend was eager to see a real Mississippi Valley plantation. And it would be difficult to find one more interesting than Houmas House.
The six of us (Mary Leigh brought The Boy with her) jammed into MA's trusty Honda SUV, along with all the chairs we rented for the Thanksgiving crowd at the Cool Water Ranch. The eastern end of LA 22 is a few blocks from the rental place. The other end is practically around the corner from Houmas House. It's a nice drive, running along bayous lined with fishing camps and large live oaks festooned with moss.
[caption id="attachment_40045" align="alignnone" width="480"]
New Carriageway dining room at Houmas House.[/caption]
Kevin Kelly, who is one of those guys who does about six times as much in a unit of time than any normal person, insisted on taking us around personally. The first stop was the just-completed carriageway banquet room. "It came out closer to what I wanted than anything else I've built," he said.
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Reindeer taking a rest on the big table at Houmas House.[/caption]
For big-time feasting, these premises would be hard to top. In an extravagantly spacious room with tall ceilings and many large windows, a single long table seats some around forty people. A parade of substantial-looking reindeer are lined up in the center. Kevin picked one up and said, "Plastic. I could have bought brass reindeers for a lot more money, but they wouldn't have looked any better."
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Kitchen at Houmas House.[/caption]
Chef Jeremy Langlois--who the day before had served Thanksgiving dinner to well over five hundred people--has one hell of a great kitchen to support his big feasts in the carriageway. After the production of the television series Treme ended, the very well-equipped kitchen in which some of the action was set was dismantled and put on the block. It had never been used, and was the best kind of professional culinary artillery. Kevin picked it up for about a third of what the TV guys had paid.
We stopped in the Garconniere for mint juleps. I put the bartender under some pressure by showing him my credentials as a bona-fide Kentucky Colonel, and therefore the kind of guy who knows a good julep when he tastes it. (And it was good.)
En route to the new guest houses, we passed through the impressive gardens. Which were down at the mouth at that moment. The early freezing weather had ripped the soul out of the papayas and other tropical plants.
The guest houses, which had only begun to be used this week, occupied a fascinating piece of land consisting of a small levee from nearly 200 years ago, with equally modest ditches on either side. That alone gave the place an unmistakable feeling of the bayou and the river country. The suites were equally appropriate, as well as very comfortable. I started thinking about how perfect a place this would be to write my novel. (As if that were possible in any practical way.)
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Spiral staircase in the main house at Houmas House Plantation.[/caption]
I've toured the main Houmas House building numerous times, but I never get tired of hearing the stories over again. Kevin's collection of artifacts runs into the hundreds and perhaps thousands of pieces, and every one of them has a fascinating story behind it.
We moved on to Glendale about an hour later than we'd planned, but it didn't make much difference. Some thirty or so people hung around, trying to decide whether to stay outside in the lawn's chilly breezes, or to go inside the plantation house amd watch a football game.
A buffet of food that had become cold by this late in the day was brought out for the second time. It was picked at in a desultory way. I didn't talk with many of the people here who I knew, but with total strangers, with whom the Lanaux connection made it easy to tap in. I spoke for a long time with a lady from Panama. She told me that hardly anyone who lives in Panama has ever been to the Canal. The government there is trying to turn the man-made wonder (and it really is that, as I saw in a canal transit on a cruise a few years ago) into a tourist attraction.
For many of us, this return to Glendale was nostalgic. Five or six times, the Boy Scout unit in which Jude and the two Lanaux brothers took part for ten years camped out here. Those were wonderful times, but they now sleep in memory, and when recalled are unimpressive. Especially to the boys. But one must grow up.
[title type="h5"]Houmas House. River Parishes: River Road, Burnside. 225-473-9380.[/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris November 29, 2013 16:48 in
