<span style="font-style: italic">Resting majestically in the center of an old-growth sycamore grove lies one of the South’s greatest forgotten treasures – a 225-year old plantation house and sprawling estate in rural Louisiana. The Old Sycamore Plantation, dubbed </span>Ol’ Syc’<span style="font-style: italic"> by those who had lived and worked there, is an enormous and once beautiful home with a complex past and bright future. <br/><br/>While not far from the big cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, the land around the estate is in pristine, almost natural condition. After the local farming industry faded in the last century most local residents moved to the cities to find work. Not long after that exodus the preservationists and environmentalists moved in to save the building and the endangered species that live on its grounds. The home became a tourist attraction and a popular stop on southern historical and Civil War bus tours. <br/><br/>Although it was built to last, no historic structure can survive the ravages of time and weather without help. The building slowly began to degrade until it was beyond the ability of the SLPS, the Southern Louisiana Preservation Society’s means to keep it open. Sadly, its doors were closed to the public in 1985 and the building was put up for auction. There it languished, on and off the market for thirty years, all the while falling further and further into disrepair. Just as the SLPS was about to send in the bulldozers, though, the building was saved. Investor and famed preserver of historic homes, Kyle Winter of Winter Preservations stepped in in June of 2015 when he purchased the home and vowed to return it to its former glory.<br/><br/>Progress in the past few months has been slow…</span><br/><br/>At that point Kyle stopped reading the email in order to begin his reply. The firm he had hired to publicize his work needed to be straightened out.<span style="font-style: italic">Work is progressing steadily… not slowly…</span>he typed in rapidly.<span style="font-style: italic">And checkered past? No way – we can’t write anything about…</span>That’s when he heard it.<br/><br/>BOOM.<br/><br/>Kyle looked up from his iPad with an annoyed expression. The room he was using as an office had been a nursery some two hundred years before. Faded wallpaper, torn and flagging, waved in the sunlight and slight breeze that entered through the open window. Kyle’s desk was an old door propped up on wooden sawhorses, which was itself covered with large format drawings, a laptop computer, phone, iPad, measuring tape and a hammer – all of the essential tools of a modern contractor. He sat on an antique desk chair brought in from another room. Every surface in the room was dusty from two centuries of neglect and a light coating of sawdust. The ancient hardwood plank floor creaked and groaned as the structural subcontractor foreman approached, hardhat in hand. Before the man could speak Kyle pointed out that he wasn’t wearing his safety glasses.<br/><br/>“Eye protection, Larry,” he said, glancing up from his device with a concerned expression.<br/><br/>“’Course, sorry about that sir,” the man replied with sincere politeness and a southern accent, fishing the plastic glasses out of his back pocket.<br/><br/>“Was it the lift again?” Kyle asked, referring to the loud noise.<br/><br/>“Yessir. We are swapping it out now. Sorry about that, I know how delicate the floors are. But I also wanted you to know that beam seven has to go. It’s rotted to the core.” In response Kyle switched to a construction tracking app on his device and looked up beam seven.<br/><br/>“Yes that’s what we thought. Thank you, Larry,” Kyle replied simply, letting the man get back to his work. Just as he turned around Kyle interrupted him. “Oh – and something else too. Do you know where I can get horsehair on the cheap around here? For the plaster? It is so expensive online.”<br/><br/>Larry chucked. “SLAPS is making you put in actual horsehair plaster?” he asked, referring to the contractor’s nickname for the local preservation society overseeing the project, SLPS. Kyle rolled his eyes and nodded, to which Larry offered to see what he could do.<br/><br/>After the crew had gone home for the day Kyle walked through the grand foyer to take photos for social media. The ceilings had been opened to reveal massive posts and beams once cut from single, old-growth trees that no longer existed anywhere. Kyle had decided the right thing to do was replace them with steel, but the metal would be invisible once the work was done.<br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">Timbers that haven’t seen the light of day in 225 years, #OlSyc #SLPS</span>he wrote in his Facebook post as a caption to the photos. It was then he noticed Angelique’s message.<br/><br/>It had been a while since she reached out and it was more than a welcome distraction. A while back he had invited her to come visit one of his projects anytime and she finally had taken him up on it. His heartrate sped up as he looked over her recent photos. Before long he responded.<br/><br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">Come on down! I have the kitchen and a few of the bedrooms finished – you would be the first B&amp;B guest in decades. It would be fantastic to have company. Just let me know your flight and I’ll pick you up at MSY. My mobile is the same if you want to catch up about the details. Really looking forward to it.</span><br/><br/>As soon as he sent the post Kyle instantly wondered if he had done the right thing. They hadn’t been a thing in a long time, and she had moved on a long time ago. At his core, though, he knew he hadn’t. The distance of being friends over facebook was one thing, being only friends in person was another. He sighed.<br/><br/>“If you only knew you were the one that got away,” he said out loud to no one in particular. His dog Alex, who had been hiding all day from the construction work, looked up and searched Kyle’s eyes. He reached down and scratched her neck for a minute before going off to make dinner.