Illustration by Burton Durand
Autumn in Audubon Park is a busy time of year. But it’s not just the New Orleanians, at last released from the sticky grip of summer, who flock to the canopied walkways and sunlit greens. Look inward, towards the park’s lagoon, and you’ll realize why that bushy mud pile came to be called Bird Island. In the fall, the great migratory droves encamp here for a time; feast on the slithering, swimming, hopping, buzzing meals all around and then continue on their way South when winter finally pokes its nose (ever so briefly) into our little corner of the swamp.
I was contemplating these flocks of winged tourists when a thought came to me: Where do these birds call home? I have always assumed, quite xenocentrically, that migratory birds have a single location that they consider home and that everywhere else they stop in their seasonal cycle is merely a way station, of minor significance compared to the pull of their native land. But watching the ducks and herons and ibises and egrets jostling about, it occurred to me that perhaps this place is as sacred to them as any other. Although a few birds actually make nests and raise their young here, the majority do not. Nevertheless, these spots where they congregate, called rookeries, may be as much a home to them as anywhere else. What’s more, they often come back to the same rookery year after year. It must be that these birds at Audubon Park and in the grassy marshes and bayous all over this region feel entirely at home here, or why else would they return? Does a Canada Goose consider herself Canadian? If she had reason to wear one, what would be emblazoned on her T-shirt, the maple leaf or the fleur-de-lis?
The scene brought to mind the many migrations I have undertaken. As a transplant to this state, I cannot say I have ever felt more at home anywhere else; yet even this place that I love so much does not fully represent home for me. After all, before the age of 18, I had moved eleven times, twice between two countries. Since then, and until I settled in New Orleans, I could not accept any one place as my hometown. I simply didn’t spend enough time in any place to consider it my home, familiar though it might be. There is, after all, a big difference between living somewhere and feeling at home.
Then came the great stormy “migration” of 2005, when the winds that swept through picked us up and made migratory birds of us all, for a time. I flocked with friends in Lafayette to ride out Katrina, then fluttered around New Orleans for the next two weeks as part of the medical relief effort in the region, only to be rudely shaken out of town again by her milder sister, Rita. This time, I flapped off to Mississippi, making for Natchez on a whim and ended up taking the last available B&B bed in town, at a little antebellum cottage called Twin Oaks, deep in the heart of that magical old place.
A friend and I arrived in the afternoon and were greeted by the proprietor, Regina Charboneau. A veritable hurricane of activity herself, Regina was busily sorting through Internet reservations and preparing a three-course dinner, all while listening eagerly to our experiences of late; we were all too happy to unload on a willing ear. As two junior surgical residents who had just lived through one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in U.S. history, we were still trying to make sense of it all. Regina opened her home, her heart, and her kitchen to us; and for the first time in weeks we both felt like we were, more or less, at home. Giant four-poster beds and a Jacuzzi bathtub greeted us as we peeled off our dirty scrubs and breathed the tranquil, balmy air filled with the songs of the cicadas that had gone silent in New Orleans those few weeks earlier.
We were treated to a spectacular dinner in the big house—not a common treat for guests, we later found out, and not a common dinner experience either. Because, among other things, Regina is a very successful restaurateur, having run gourmet establishments in San Francisco and New York prior to returning to her native Natchez, where she opened yet another booming success, Biscuits & Blues (the first Biscuits & Blues was in San Francisco). We sipped wine brought up from the cellar by Doug, Regina’s husband, a former executive at California’s La Crema winery. Needless to say, there had hardly been a more awestruck pair of dinner guests than the two weary, wind-damaged bits of flotsam that sat at that table. We rode out Rita, unlike Katrina, in true Southern style. As we departed, we hugged Doug and Regina as old friends do, and I felt that unexpected connection that occurs when you find a little piece of home where you least expect it.
Years later, when my wife decided to give the Ironman in Louisville a try, we made a training weekend out of another visit to Twin Oaks. Once again, Regina and Doug welcomed us with open arms—and kitchen cabinets—and we caught up on the old and the new, as one does with family. We biked and ran the Natchez Trace, weaving through the gentle hills and shade-speckled pavement, and my wife got the necessary boost she needed to carry her through the final weeks of pre-race anxiety. On the actual weekend of the race, ironically, another hurricane, this one named Gustav, made us spend an unplanned, but entirely welcome, extra weekend at Twin Oaks to ride out the worst of the aftermath. I discovered that recovering from 132 miles of constant exercise is best done in a Jacuzzi tub-for-two with a flat screen TV to make one forget the aches … or so I gathered, given that I didn’t actually run the race. Still, holding up signs at the side of the road for fifteen hours is not as easy as it sounds.
Recently, we ventured back to Twin Oaks with my mother as a birthday-gift weekend getaway when she visited from Miami. As a veteran antiquarian, my mother veritably drooled over the antebellum splendor everywhere we looked. The magnificent Dunleith Historic Inn stands just across Homochitto Street and serves the “breakfast” portion of Twin Oaks’ B&B, an irony—Regina is a chef, after all—necessitated by the Charboneaus’ busy schedules. In 2013 she and Doug re-opened King’s Tavern, a restored eighteenth-century tavern and the oldest building in town. There they’ve brought together their love for food with shared passions for fine spirits, craft cocktails, and historic preservation. Right next door is Doug’s pet project, the state’s only rum distillery, which was co-founded with the couple’s son, Jean-Luc. Regina has also written her second cookbook, Mississippi Current, which divides the regional cuisines of the Mississippi River Valley according to their places along sections of the river. We caught up on all this as we sipped excellent wine at a table where the couple has entertained movie stars and famous musicians and, once, a pair of worn out surgical residents fleeing a catastrophe.
And so I contemplate the birds in the park, the ones who only fly in when the weather makes their home inhospitable, and consider my own good fortune to have found, as they evidently have, yet another delightful little sliver of the world to call home for a time. Because the heart does not abide by geographical assignations, but seems to settle on people and places that welcome and shelter and comfort it. If home is where the heart is, then I must have pieces of it scattered all over this world. And I intend to spend the rest of my life roaming to find them all.
