The Wimberley Bal de Maison

Early this summer, on our 40th wedding anniversary, we went to Wimberley in the Texas Hill Country to meet some friends at their handsome antique rock cabins along the Blanco River. And while the river was more blanco from drought-exposed limestone than from frothy moving water, it was a rip-roaring weekend. We waded rather than float in inner tubes, grilled banquets of meats and vegetables, drank a lot of downright perfect Parisian Sidecars and martinis, stuffed our faces with wedding cake, and laughed. When I try to recapture that pivotal moment when I felt home in the cool evenings under the shivering oaks and cypress trees, it’s clear. David, our host, put on a CD of Cajun fiddle and accordion music and danced with me one evening and a burst of energy seized my body and I wanted to move, with or without my mind.

In summer when I was young, my parents often sent me to stay with relatives in Louisiana, for a ‘Camp Creole.’ Remembrances of Tante Lucia’s and N’onc Black’s home in Church Point etched an ethereal image in my mind of a way to live life. As the day shaded with a blanket of the Milky Way, the women made vanilla custard on the stove in a kitchen that was bursting with eager-to-lick-the-pot children. The men took turns cranking the dasher of the wooden-staved ice cream maker and poured salt over ice chopped from a block

with an ice pick so that the cream could turn colder and thicker. Cousin Albern often brought out his French concertina and all who knew the old Cajun songs would lend voice to the chanky-chank music.

As the familiar staccato beat began, children would run out and dance barefooted in the dirt yard. By the light bulb from the kitchen, we could see the fresh sliced peaches and blackberries as they were carried out through the screen door. We knew the crème was prêt and scrambled for a seat at the rough-hewn cypress table. The night twinkled with fireflies and the Milky Way. Frogs and crickets bestowed the percussion line to Albern’s first person French narrative tunes.

These were my first bals de maison, essentially small family get-togethers that might erupt into an all night house dance at any moment. The music of my home was born for boogie. Sure, you could go to a public dance hall or into the streets for the fais-do-dos at festivals in Lafayette, but the spontaneous surge of a family into dance in their own home was new to me. In these moments, no one thought about how little they had, whether they were ahead of their neighbors, or what would become of them.

After David asked for the first dance in Wimberley, my husband Steve, who has only survived the last 40 years by learning to dance, stole me for the next four songs. I was captivated then and every time he says, “let’s dance!”

For anyone who doesn’t feel this music in every nerve and muscle, it must seem odd that we can’t sit still when we hear our music. Often, Steve and I, alone in our house, will turn up the iTunes on our computer and dance to Ray Charles, or Chuck Berry, Joe Cocker, or Marvin Gaye. It’s not an accordion player in the dusty yard at Tante Lucia’s, but I’m home.