Reached a point where I did not remember actually formally volunteering. He’d left behind the spooky photos of water-stained heart-pine Adam-paneled parlors, of fanlights shaped like yard-wide scallop shells, of English boxwoods about the size of the planet Pluto (his line, not yours truly’s). Here I was, not even a dues-paying member. All the paperwork was disfiguring my kitchen table. I felt put upon. And yet somehow, by the following Thursday, I had talked the mayor’s wife (Deedee Pruden, darling girl, always so good in art class at “catching likenesses”) into heading a task force that would make the Meade-Ulrich mansion a Hospitality Center for the city of Little Washington. In other words, I felt like I had somewhat helped to start to save an antebellum jewel that’d taken three years and 40,000 1803 dollars and untold day laborers—slaves and Boston brick masons—to build.

By the following week, Tad and Patrick were right here cooking soft-shell crabs at my own till-lately seldom-used (except for coffee) stove. And it was only when I heard myself say, by phone (while they eavesdropped as planned), heard myself say somewhat flirtatiously to a boy from Shelby that I used to date, “Honey? Reeve? Are you listening? Because if you and the other so-called pillars of Shelby sit around there sipping your ‘Jacks and water’ while some nouveau Atlanta yahoo takes his tractor to that Osage House’s bracketed cornices given an Italianate flavor by the square porch posts and those heavy corn-patterned pilasters in our beloved region’s finest Greek Revival idiom, why, the ghost of your sainted Grandmother Spruill (who always liked me, God rest her soul), she’s going to put a serious hex on your golf game, Reeve. Now, think.”

And it was only when Tad and Patrick laughed, then covered their mouths (afraid to mess up a hard deal I was driving with a little of my late husband’s serious financial flair, if I do say so myself!)—it was only then that your Mary Ellen Broadfield here understood how Preservation might, if approached correctly, prove … well … preservative.

II.