A Delta Housewarming

Since I was twenty-five, by which time I’d been away from home for almost ten years, I’ve fantasized about building a house, a retreat of sorts, in or near my hometown in the Mississippi Delta. I hadn’t realized how long I’d actually had this particular dream until a few weeks ago when I found a love letter from the man I almost married that brought me to my knees. In it, he envisioned the place that even then he knew I’d always wanted, and that he had wanted for both of us. “Could you hang orchids from the veranda like you do in Malaysia, and grow mangoes in the garden?” he wrote. We would have a Vietnamese cook who would do miraculous things to catfish; we’d gaze out at the Mississippi in reclining wicker chairs “having some sort of long drink” or maybe “a fine old Armagnac.”

An obvious first question might be why in the world I called off my wedding to this lovely, poetic man. The answer to his own question is no, you cannot hang orchids from the veranda except maybe in the dead of summer, and we’d need a greenhouse for the mangoes. When he sent the letter, he had not