Today, May 4, 2019, is the 30th anniversary of Momma’s death. That reads like a lifetime ago, but it still feels so fresh.

She birthed nine babies (I was the marvelous middle child); and ran a very successful beauty shop for ten years, and thank the universe for that because it was that beauty shop that kept us all fed when the other family business, the motel she ran with Daddy, was nearly lost (more on that in the book, The Canasta Summers – Memoirs of a Cajun Boy, anticipated 2020).

The farthest she ever traveled was to Gatlinburg, then Knoxville, Tennessee, for the 1982 World’s Fair, with Kathy Frulla, my sister Alisa, and me, in Kathy’s big orange Cadillac (we called it “Pumpkin” – it had crocheted glitter-yarn throw pillows on the back dash).

She’d have turned 93 this year, had she not died in that horrible crash just down the road a bit from the motel in 1989.

What a momma she was.

I will always love you “big-big,” Eliza Mae Thompson Ardoin.

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