This is a great beginning to the day. I am Lordess of the Manor! All and sundry are out working or playing and I get to be home with puppy and the beautiful clear, dry, sunny day . . . at least until about noon! Then we'll go to Chris' to pick up dinner for tonight. I expect we'll get a couple of boned, stuffed chickens and a southern side but have no clue what we'll choose. It's always fun to go to the meat market because they have so much that we don't get at home: smothered corn, crawfish pie, crawfish & corn soup, stuffed rabbit, whole stuffed quail, tur-duck-en, stuffed rib eyes, boudin balls, stuffed pork chops with shrimp, stuffed deboned chicken with crawfish dressing, bell peppers with shrimp, chicken and sausage gumbo, crawfish etouffee, shrimp and crab fettuccini et cetera. It's always a double "Wow!" trip.
Puppy's Pop and son flew one of the smaller planes last evening and when they weren't going round and down in significant patterns one could hear the woodpeckers knocking and the bull frogs croaking. Did have a bit of a bug problem but if you use a lot of Off you can keep them under control!
Grampa and I went to visit two plantation homes. One was just OK and the other was magnificently restored. The first was The Myrtles. "Long recognized as America's most haunted house both by parapsychologists and the media, The Myrtles is a twenty-eight-room Louisiana bed-and-breakfast once owned by Frances Kermeen. . . . Frances tells the story of how she was drawn to this former plantation mansion, its bone-chilling history, and the incredible encounters of the ghostly kind she had that forever changed her beliefs about the supernatural," We were only allowed to tour about 10 rooms, all on the first floor and although the guide was a nice young woman I thought the tour was a bit of a boor. But she had her stories to tell and I bought the book written by a former owner. It does have a very varied and interesting history and was used as a hospital for the Confederates during the Civil War. Then, as we were passing by the entrance to Rosedown on our way back to Slaughter, Grampa thought we should take it in. I am so glad that we did. The main house was constructed in 1834-1835. The most surprising thing is that most of the furnishings purchased by the Turnbulls remained with the house and are still on display. It was amazing to be allowed to go into each room and look at everything without being cordoned off. The Park Ranger who showed us around, just the two of us, played the piano for us in the music room. Most startling is that the Turnbull family members sold the old plantation in 1956 to Catherine Underwood a very oil rich woman and amateur horticulturalist. She did an eight-year, over $10,000,000, historic restoration of the house and formal gardens. I believe that it was in 2000 that Louisiana bought the gardens, 13 buildings and 371 acres that remained of the Rosedown Plantation. The clothes, bedding, writings and furniture are in wonderful condition because the last Turnbull to live there died in 1955 and proper records were kept of everything. Truly worth visiting again. The gardens cover about 28 acres and using Martha Turnbull's garden diaries the gardens were returned to their original state.
Perhaps tomorrow we'll take a ride on Lake Pontchartrain!
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