My children and I recently took what we think was our 30th trip to Orange Beach. The car was packed even though we added a soft top thing for more storage. I worried about the “thing” spending the night atop the car in New Orleans. “Somebody’s gonna steal my Mt. Carmel sweatshirt out of there,” I told my children. They just stared at me as though I had three heads. 

Our first stop is always the miserable grocery store. It’s part Three Stooges and part The Great Race, interspersed with greeting friends from home as though it’s been years since we’ve seen one another, when in fact we just chatted at Bi-Lo or Simoneaud’s that very morning. Since I sometimes feel like I’ve been gently moved to the back burner, or maybe it’s that burner in the middle of the stove, I follow Jacques around with his list now as he walks faster than Bo Belanger. The speed of light is not faster than my brother Bo. And by the way, the middle burner is a lovely place to be. 

We rented a condo next to the Flora-Bama for easy access to the essential Bushwacker. But having an almost 3-year-old on the trip changes the trip. There are not so many Bushwackers consumed, and since Eve’s room is right off the kitchen, we go into whisper-mode when the clock strikes 7. Jacques even brought his two blenders into my bedroom and served his frothy beach drinks from an end table.

Our diet consisted of five consumable food groups. Carbs, sugar, sodium, fat and alcohol. The romaine went untouched. The closest we came to a green was Martha Stewart’s homemade guacamole with sour cream slathered on top of a crispy quesadilla that was stuffed with cheese and jalapeno peppers.

We pretty much let Eve have anything she wanted to eat, and watch any Disney movie she wanted to watch, which is the opposite of her home life. We made lame demands such as you have to take at least eight bites of your meal, but often settled on four chased down with normally not-allowed snacks while watching movies in a sugary fog. She hardly slept because her room didn’t have a lamp, and because her crib and pillow and sheets were different, and due to her room being the size of a large ottoman, she was able to knock on the door from that unfamiliar crib and shout, “Is anybody out there?” We thought about staying longer, but the chance of her developing diabetes was imminent, and my daughter Emily said she needed to get home to enroll her in some sort of boot camp for some cognizant behavioral therapy.

I got a call the next morning saying Eve slept through the night, ate every bit of her avocado toast, sipped on freshly squeezed orange juice and sat attentively while Emily read a Caldecott Medal Winner book to her. I, on the other hand, am trying to drop the pounds gained from french fries, fried eggs in a nest topped with etouffeé, fried chicken biscuits with Steen’s Cane Syrup in the yellow can, BLTs with our newly discovered Duke’s mayo, mud pie with extra buttery oreo cookie crust and Original BBQ Lays. As people who gain weight from eating like a farmhand always seem to say, “I’m sure it’s just the sodium.”

PHYLLIS BELANGER MATA was born at the old Dauterive Hospital and grew up on Wayne Street. She is a 1974 graduate of Mt. Carmel Academy and is a chili dog “without the wiener” aficionado.