NEW ORLEANS – Mary Louise Brown Morgan kept a garden full of rosebushes and just about every kind of fruit tree, from plums to satsuma oranges to kumquats.
And when the lawn surrounding her south Louisiana home grew too high, the 78-year-old grandmother climbed on her lawnmower to cut it herself. “She had the most beautiful yard on the block,” said her grandson, Steve Morgan.
Morgan, a “God-fearing woman” who made a “mean gumbo and red beans,” died on March 27, he said. She was the first in Terrebonne Parish to succumb to the coronavirus, in a state where COVID-19 is taking a heavy toll.
Born in New Orleans on Jan. 5, 1942, she was a lifelong resident of Gray, Louisiana — a small town of about 6,000 people, deep in the state's Acadiana