Houston history helped me grieve my divorce
I put on my mask while crossing the long suspension bridge over the mocha-colored water below. I wear it because of the pandemic but also because tears can be soaked up by a mask and it can also disguise my trembling lip as I pay the fee to enter the gardens at Bayou Bend.
I let it all go on these grounds and down my cheeks as I pass the elm trees, the white and red oaks. The garden is where I’ve gone to process the end of my marriage. It’s the perfect place to social distance because no one is ever here.
There’s a sense of relief in seeing the sun hitting the historic mansion that sits atop a grassy hill that a child would love to sled down, but this is Texas and no one even owns a sled. I sit on a bench, listen to the fountain water hitting the reflecting pool and think about how much life has changed.
When my husband wanted to leave our Manhattan life where we met and return to his roots in Houston, I was reluctant. I had grown up in Syracuse, N.Y., and I never imagined Texas. I never imagined my children eating crawfish, I never considered Tex Mex an option for lunch, I never imagined the floods or worries about a hurricane season, and I never thought about humidity.
I have struggled to find my ground here in new territory I never intended to be where the heat scorches your soul. Even when I started socializing, attending events, book readings and conferences, at the pit of me, a wound from relocation grief hasn’t left.
It was as though leaving the place where we had met revealed what didn’t work for our marriage. The conversations that never happened over our 10 years as husband and wife surfaced for the worst and, it would turn out, we hadn’t grown into our best selves. The feelings replay as I walk the gardens at Bayou Bend, the wooded pathways and winding ravines, helped me untangle the loss of my marriage.
I walk to unload my sadness while admiring the evergreen and the new buds not yet bloomed. It’s a comfort passing the manicured garden hedges one minute and then a few steps more seeing the opposite landscape of untamed native wild plants.
I will discover later the woman who lived in the mansion and created these gardens, Ima Hogg, walked these trails as she reached middle age, created her own life and gave Houston a foundation for the arts and the Houston Symphony. Hearing my feet on the same gravel pathways, suddenly being in Houston nourishes me. Hogg gave me a place to grieve.
While cleaning out my handbag, I found at the bottom the crinkled brochure about the mansion and gardens and, while reading it, I saw my last name.
I’m shocked to realize the architect of the mansion is John Staub, my last name before marriage. My father’s last name. I had been carrying around this connection in my handbag unknowingly.
Is this merely coincidence or something more ethereal? There’s no relation I know of but I go with it. I need, at the least, a symbol of my roots. During another visit I notice on a memorial plaque that Ima’s long time gardener was born the day my father died.
I search more online about Staub and his work. He had started his architecture career in New York and then moved to the South for an opportunity to build gorgeous homes in River Oaks. Houston had been good to him, and it makes me feel that could happen for me in some way too.
One night when I couldn’t sleep, I was researching where the grave of John Staub was, and I ended up at the website of Glenwood Cemetery. One of the first names I saw was Charlotte Marie Baldwin. I learn her husband, Augustus C. Allen, was one of the founding brothers of Houston, and had lived in Chittenango, 24 minutes from my home city of Syracuse, N.Y. I let the unanticipated sink in.
It’s speculated that part of the money to invest in Houston came from Allen’s wife, Charlotte. I take note — why not — that my niece’s name is Charlotte. My grandmother’s name on my mother’s side is Marie, but where Baldwin is from is most surprising.
She grew up in Baldwinsville in Onondaga County, N.Y. The same county as I did until I left for college in Manhattan. I know Baldwinsville well, it’s where my mother taught for 20 years at Van Buren Elementary. I competed against B’ville for track and cross country races in high school. Suddenly where I come from, over 1,600 miles away, isn’t far.
In time, Charlotte and her husband would separate. She would make her own life here anyways, and live in Houston for another 45 years.
In all my resistance to accept these surroundings and notch on my timeline, this is the start of my renewal. When I’m questioning the footprint I can leave here, I think about what I can build and how I can grow into this Southern city. When I’m feeling time slip, and wondering what life would look like elsewhere, I think about how the founders knew a northern wind, knew what a blizzard was and were kin to a state more mountainous with bold seasons that measured the days of their lives before there was Houston. I’m letting this landscape of strong women guide me as I restart here, in the Bayou City that turns out is closer to my roots than I ever imagined it to be.