CHAPTER 12 – THE BIRTH 1982 – Pregnancy agreed with me, except for the first few months when I often felt queasy but never nauseated enough to toss my cookies. It was spring, the time of new life, and I blossomed in spirit as my belly grew with child. The only “scare” I had was…
April 1981. That was it. It was done. Small, cozy home wedding followed by honeymoon in Hawaii. Time to finish up my first semester in Elementary Education with some good grades and take the summer off to plan, dream, and think about what the future holds. That was the summer I fell in love with…
1981 – Shortly after The Captain gave me the ruby engagement ring, we moved from my little apartment in Thibodaux to a rent house in his home community of Dulac, meaning “of the lake” because it sits on the edge of Lake Boudreaux. Bayou Grand Caillou, which means “big rock”, runs through the community. It’s…
For days after my first crew boat excursion, all I could think about were the mysteries that lie beyond the mouth of Bayou Grand Caillou in that vast ocean called the Gulf of Mexico. Previously, those were just words on the map sitting below Louisiana, between Florida and Texas. Now, those words denoted a real…
Crew-change day was there before I knew it and time to embark on a new adventure. Oh sure, I had ridden on crew boats when I worked over at the production dock. My first was a ride out to the edge of the Gulf of Mexico on a fifty-foot crew-boat run by a suntanned crew…
How do you court someone when you live where you work, seven days at a stretch? Any time and any place, that’s how, because in the oil field, there is no schedule. Time doesn’t mean a thing. Ever heard the old saying, “Hurry up and wait”? Well, that’s the oil field in a nutshell. The…