Just for a Season
Our three oldest boys were born in three consecutive years, arriving like Irish triplets. When they were all under the age of five, loading the minivan for a road trip felt like preparing a traveling circus, complete with portable cribs, swings, and gear. We were a spectacle at every stop. At gas stations across Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, I carried one child like a football, wore another on my back, and guided the third by his hand. Passersby would often remark, “Three boys are a handful!” They were right, but because we were traveling to see close family across state borders, the effort was always worth the chaos.
Back then, we still gathered at Black Bayou. Seth’s grandparents’ home featured a back wall of windows where we watched the sun rise and set over the water from a long dining table. Depending on the hour, we sat together with coffee or gin, observing anhingas and egrets beneath a decades-old tree canopy. Because we married young, my memories of those visits are full of energy; we handled life with enthusiasm, savoring food, wine, and a deep sense of place. We did whatever it took to maintain our family trajectory, determined not to miss a single moment together.
Whenever our family gathered, we celebrated. This was a shift for me, as I came from a culture of survivalists rather than celebrants. Grandad would begin supper prayers by leading us in the Doxology, singing in harmony while we squeezed hands. He would bellow a blessing to “keep us ever mindful of the needs of others,” his Southern drawl rendering the words with a unique, beloved cadence. Afterward, the room filled with laughter, wine, and playful political debates that felt sacred in their own way. While my upbringing was focused on a quieter, more reserved faith, I grew to love this vibrant environment. In my youth, we were truly grateful for our meals, but feast was never a word we used to describe them.
At that table, the men were the ones who’d hunted for the meat we ate (something familiar to me), but in Louisiana, the men were also the ones who cooked it. It was not so much upscale as it was so delicious that you’d sell a kidney to have the chance to eat it. Here are some of the meals I recall: crawfish over angel hair pasta; duck gumbo; red beans and rice; steamed shrimp; smothered quail. With all of it, there was plenty of wine, plenty of gin, and decades of laughter.
Grandmom and Grandad’s Louisiana table will always be my favorite table, carved walnut and long enough for their four kids to bring their kids who also brought theirs. It was the living table of a great-grandmother, and she set it with southern precision, in decadent layers of greenery and understated class. We transitioned into true adulthood as we listened to stories around that table. There was always a primary topic to discuss, everyone had their say if they could fit into the conversation, and every disagreement—and there was plenty of disagreement—was good-natured because we were family.
Going to visit my people was very different. We’re a lot more country than Seth’s family, who is a bit more country club. We centered life on the table in Alabama too, but I grew up more in a skillet cornbread kind of way, down long dirt roads around people who filled their cellars with preserved food instead of bottles of wine. My people are from hills and barn raisings and bottle-fed calves, and I have a great deal of pride in that. This accounts for my toughness, my humor, my closeness to the natural world, my ability to cut somebody who’s up to no good, and my ability to survive on cheese and saltine crackers with a little dab of hot sauce. Seth’s people are from boggy waters, Spanish moss, clinking glasses, and a right place to put a fork. Both had their share of secrets and shadows. Neither was better or worse than the other. They were just different (except in the realm of hot sauce), and when I became Seth’s wife, I was fascinated by the spectrum of what it meant to be who we are as Seth and Amber Haines.
I took to his people easily, and they took to me. I had never been called a princess before Grandad, and though I tended to hate talk like that (because I want to be taken seriously, not fluffily), I believed him when he said it to me. I was loved, and I was a granddaughter there. And maybe even on some mornings with a cup of coffee looking out at the quiet waters, just for a soft little minute, I was a princess, albeit a smart princess in pants. That sense of place his grandparents created taught me good things about myself that I hadn’t known before. They were true of me without going to Louisiana, but going there helped me see them and live them out.
Grandmom was already sick when I met Seth, but her decline was slow enough that we still had time to learn from her. Once she was gone, we still gathered and tried to set the table in her way, but it wasn’t the same. Grandad still sang to great-grandbabies, rocking them in his chair, but the deep grief of losing his lover set in thick. When we lost him and the house sold, nothing could have prepared me for the realization that some tables are only for a season.
Content taken from The Deep Down Things by Amber C. Haines and Seth Haines, ©2023. Used by permission of Brazos Press.
