The flower beds are planted with azaleas, lilies, hibiscus, philodendron, and rosebushes in the sun and caladiums and hydrangeas in the shade. The yard is over an acre in size and covered with pecan trees, slash pine, and live oaks. The back of the property slopes down to the Teche, and late at night barges and tugboats with green and red running lights drone heavily through the drawbridge at Burke Street on their way to Morgan City. At early dawn there is often ground fog in the trees and on the bayou, and inside it you can sometimes hear a gator flopping or ducks wimpling in the shallows.

Our elderly three-legged pet coon, named Tripod, lives in a hutch in the backyard. His sidekick is an unneutered male cat by the name of Snuggs. Snuggs has a neck like a fireplug and a body that ripples with muscle when he walks. He wears his chewed ears and the pink scars inside his short white hair like badges of honor. The only dogs he allows in the yard are those who have received Tripod’s stamp of approval.

Our next-door neighbor is Miss Ellen Deschamps, an eighty-three-year-old graduate of Millsaps College who feeds every stray cat in New Iberia. She despises people who litter and once hit a man in the head with a bag of carrots for dumping his automobile’s ashtray in the Winn-Dixie parking lot. She also considers Snuggs a profligate interloper but feeds him just the same. Early in the morning I can see Miss Ellen through the bamboo border on our property, feeding her cats or at work in her garden, the big pockets of her apron stuffed with tools and packets of seed. The image of Miss Ellen bending to her tasks on a daily basis, indifferent to the role of eccentric imposed on her by others, always makes me feel better about the world.