Back where I come from

Last week I drove my mother five hours, back to her old hometown for a visit with friends. This has become a regular fall event for us and I made the commitment that she wouldn't miss it. With mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer eighteen months ago, it was important to keep our mother-daughter tradition going. This year a longtime friend was in Texas for a visit and she joined us for the roadtrip back to southeast Texas since she was flying out of Houston back to her home in Holland. We opted to stop at Tia Juanita's in Winnie for late lunch and we weren't disappointed.

This restaurant very successfully fuses Tex-Mex and Cajun in the most delicious way. We started off with a sampling of several appetizers, including boudain balls, hush puppies with Mexican butter and a pistolette. Basically a pistolette is a flat piece of dough resembling a kolache with crawfish etouffe baked inside it. My entree was the seafood enchiladas. I could eat buckets of the pepper jack cream sauce they pour over the crab and shrimp stuffed enchiladas. Every bite was incredibly tasty.

We continued the seafood palooza on Friday at Pine Tree Lodge with a group of mother's friends. Afterwards, everybody returned to our lovely Victorian VRBO for some cake from my mother's favorite bakery, Champagne's over in mid-county.

On Saturday, I took mother to Floyd's for one more seafood meal. She met an old friend and her husband for lunch. I was just about shrimped out by then, so I switched over to the crab au gratin with a side of grilled asparagus.

Since the Beaumont hotels tend to be a bit run down and kinda scary, I found a sweet little 3/2 Victorian house located amidst a pine tree farm not too far from everything on our gastronomic hit list. It was super clean, well stocked and had lots of room for mother's friends to visit.

 

 

Typical of this annual trip, we made a run by the cemeteries to put seasonal flowers on my grandmother and grandfather's graves. This year I got fancy pants and added a pretty cardinal ornament.

Mother had lost track of her old friend Joanne a few years ago. Thanks to a mutual friend of theirs, mother was able to locate her. Receiving hospice in a memory care facility now, it was a bittersweet visit. Joanne's daughter Rana met us there, and it was great to see her, too. 

Aging isn't for the faint-hearted. But praise God that He sees us through, providing the comfort and peace no matter what old age hands us. We rest secure in the knowledge that Jesus is our salvation. When we close our eyes for the final time here in our temporary earthly bodies, we are headed for our eternal home with God the Father and Jesus His Son.