Black Madonna Bousillage Grotto

Mary Black

The first weeks that I lived in the Prairie des Femmes in the summer of 2006 I was a newlywed in a refurbished cypress cottage hand-built by my husband and a crew of friends and family. Everything was new and like an old dream, the clean linens, the wood and family antiques that looked so beautiful and were freshly oiled or white-washed. Scents can bring you back in your memory. I remember the smell of the cypress and linseed oil and the fresh air of the prairie coming in through the doors those first few weeks at my new home. The clean smell of Egyptian cotton and the ozone smell of the prairie at night. There was another smell that brings me back to those weeks, and it was that of a bath oil my aunt bought me on my wedding day called Mary Black by Florence Gunnarson. It came in a real French glass bottle with a heavy square stopper. It was nearly the only bath soap I had in the house those first sparse days I spent out here. My husband left for a small tour a few weeks after our marriage, and I was alone in the prairie for the first time. There was no hot water for some reason, maybe because we had no electricity except for one extension cord stretched across the field from the branch that we only used for necessities, so I spent time at night heating our new red kettle full of hot water on the gas stove over and over to fill the tub with just enough to have a few inches of warm water. I would put the kettle on a cypress stump next to the old tub. I remember laughing to myself at the process, and wondering what to make of this new existence alone in a dark house in the Prairie des Femmes, but in retrospect, it was one of the most luxurious times I have ever had. Mary Black bath oil, like the good friend she was named for,  filled the house with the woody and vibrant citrus smells those first candlelit nights here and indeed kept me company. She seemed like she belonged in the Prairie des Femmes, so much did she smell of the fog, the prairie grasses and the resins of freshly planed Atchafalaya old growth cypress.

Vièrge Noire of Orange Street

The Queen of Grand Coteau