A BIRD IN HAND

Bird Feeders at 65 Fairbanks Circle

 

When blogging becomes slogging because of a pain in the knee (that fragile connection between brain and leg!), daily activity slows down to bird watching from the sofa here in our Sewanee, TN retreat. It’s a meditative exercise, not unpleasant, but not very productive due to a strange malady known as a “torn meniscus” of the knee. This malady is usually caused by energetic, athletic activity, which is laughable in an on-the-brink of 86 year old, namely me. Only cortisone and the sight of birds calmed this blogger.

A full bird feeder is a yard attraction we acquired last year. So far, we’ve sighted cardinals, house finches, tufted titmice, flickers, chickadees, robins, nuthatches, goldfinches, towhees, and other feathered friends that have helped soothe an ailing knee with their acrobatic dives into the air beyond our big picture window in the living room. 

I am reminded of my essay in Their Adventurous Will about Caroline Dormon, a renowned Louisiana botanist whose love of birds inspired her lifelong bird watching near Briarwood, Louisiana. She often spoke of early bird watching in which she and her brother crawled out on limbs to peer in birds’ nests near her childhood home in Arcadia, Louisiana. After moving to Briarwood, she set up many feeding stations that she filled with chops for finches and cornbread for insect eaters! She also stuffed cornbread into flat rock crevices and made pencil snapshots of wrens, titmice, and nuthatches when they assumed different feeding attitudes. 

Miss Carrie’s chats in the Shreveport Times magazine led to her edition of Bird Talk, a favorite volume read by Louisiana naturalists during the 20th century. Many evenings at dusk for 50 years or more, Miss Carrie fed birds, hundreds of varieties that she said were as keen-minded as humans. She kept a display of birds’ nests on the back porch of her Briarwood cabin, and in tales of Apocrypha concerning her behavior, she recorded stories about birds plucking hair from her head to build birds’ nests. She also wore a large hat with nuts around the brim from which birds feasted.

“I wouldn’t think of living in a house so tightly closed that birds couldn’t fly in and out and squirrels frolic freely from outside to inside. That simply would not be living,” Miss Carrie related to her Louisiana author friend Lyle Saxon. 

I envision her sitting on my front porch (which faces the back yard) in the evenings, “keeping company with skunks and scorpions,” and “the kingdom come,” as a friend once said about this beloved botanist.

Photograph by Dr. Victoria I. Sullivan, a fellow Louisiana botanist

 

 

FENCES

In “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost concludes a short poem with the often-quoted line, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Today, I thought of Frost’s poem as I looked out at our new cedar fence that divides our yard and the backyard of a new neighbor who lives on one side of our home in New Iberia, Louisiana. On the opposite side of our yard, I look out at a sagging, gray-colored, older fence, one that leans toward our drive, and which I prefer because it reminds me of the neighbor who planted satsuma trees on his side of the fence and from which we have always plucked overhanging fruit.

This good neighbor died of pancreatic cancer several decades ago. He was an amiable man who came over, at no one’s request, and raked our entire front yard following a major Louisiana hurricane. He verged on mute because he performed the task quietly, then returned to his side of the fence as if he had tended to the grooming of his own yard. I never knew anything about this neighbor’s lineage, but when satsumas form and hang over his old fence, in my mind I see a face that looks almost Native American.

He had hair the color of the ravens that nest in a tree beside his former home, a sallow complexion (perhaps caused by his disease) but he was a handsome, lonely looking fellow (although he had a wife and three young children). When I remember this man who spontaneously performed small tasks in my yard, I think of Cherokee people I had seen near Silva, North Carolina, persons whose appearance resembled the quiet neighbor, who lived and continue to live  in harmony with nature, have kind hearts, and are known as wonder workers.


 

 

Our new cedar fence on the opposite side of our home divides us from a dog yard surrounded by a flimsy wire fence that two hounds push down if they’re roaming around outside and from which they could leap over and into our yard at one time but can no longer scale because of our newly-built tall cedar one. The cedar fence is handsome and was expensive to erect, but it isn’t a wall that inspires sentiment like the old sagging fence on the other side of our drive— one that brings up cogent memories within me — those of the kind-hearted neighbor who embodied Frost’s line, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

 

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

 

THE MIND OF TREES

Live Oak on Bayou in Arnaudville

This morning amidst the continuing news about mass shootings and tragedy of the last few days, and while I pray for peace in our troubled country, I received an email from my dear friend, Karen Bourque, a master of glass artistry who lives in Church Point, Louisiana. She had attached a photograph of her latest glass piece featuring a tree in Cajun Country. Like many of Karen’s glass pieces, the work brought with it a feeling of peace. The piece wasn’t requisitioned by me, but Karen shares images of a lot of her work with me, and I share my poetry with her — an exchange of inspiration, and sometimes synchronicity. She said she was reading a poem each night from my latest, The Consolation of Gardens, and meditating on it, and I was cheered by the thought that, although I’m not on any bestseller list, some of the poems have carried the “consolation of gardens” to cherished friends.

The email with an image of her lovely glass piece reminded me of an oak tree that Karen, Darrell, Vickie, and I viewed after lunch one afternoon in Arnaudville, Louisiana and that Karen used as a model for the cover of my book, A Slow Moving Stream, published in 2016. One of the poems, “The Mind of Trees,” captured my mood and “spoke to my condition” this morning. It is partially excerpted below:

The trees outlasted their language.

No matter who came

the language disappeared into English:

French, Spanish, German, Chitimacha.

English filled the horizon,

the patois of each clan banned,

buried under the oaks, the words waiting.

The trees absorbed all of it

and when hurricanes felled them

they were cut into logs,

the loggers, finding stories in their language

imbedded in the rings,

began to preserve what had been lost.

Word by word they created

an articulation of arriving,

the sound of memory offering itself

from a distant longing. They heard

what they had been told not to hear —

testimonies for their being there.

And they praised the trees

for finding a way without them.

The poem is open to interpretation, but I believe it’s pertinent to what is going on in our country and am glad to repeat it here. Thanks for the “pass along” this morning, Karen Bourque.

Photograph in “The Mind of Trees” by Victoria I. Sullivan and glass piece image on the cover of A Slow Moving Stream by Karen Bourque.

THE VOICE WITHIN THE VOICE

Most mornings in fair weather (often not so fair in spring and summer in Louisiana), Darrell Bourque, Louisiana’s premier poet, can be found writing the lines to a new poem while walking an old path near his home in Church Point, Louisiana. He’s a master of what poets call “voice,” often entering into the voice of some lesser-known figure who has made a significant contribution to the culture and history of his/her native state. 

Bourque’s latest book, From the Other Side, is beautifully illustrated with the art of Bill Gingles, a Shreveport artist, and features poems about Henriette Delille, a former New Orleans religious figure. During the 19th century, Delille organized a group of devout Christian women called the Sisters of the Holy Family to nurse the sick, care for and teach indigent and illiterate Black and Creole children, as well as immigrating adults who settled in the French Quarter of New Orleans. This group was formally recognized in 1942 by St. Augustine Church in the Treme of New Orleans, and Delille, who died in 1862, was first deemed Servant of God in 1988, then advanced to Venerable in the process of canonization by the Roman Catholic Church. Her inclusion in the process continues — the next two steps are beatification and canonization.

Darrell Bourque and his wife, Karen, became interested in this passionate and empathetic nun several years ago — an interest which culminated in Karen designing and rendering a glass triptych for a window of Christ the King Roman Catholic Mission Church in Bellevue near the Bourque’s home in Church Point, Louisiana. The recent publication of Darrell’s book of poetry, From the Other Side: Henriette Delille followed last month’s dedication of this window. 

Although Henriette Delille spoke French (as does Bourque), Bourque captured her voice in what he terms persona sonnets in English within From the Other Side, an impassioned voice that speaks of orphans and the uneducated on the streets of the French Quarter of New Orleans — a voice derived from Bourque’s meditations on the images and colors in Gingles’ paintings; e.g.,:

What If You Dreamed

                    …We teach 

                    reading here the way we teach children to sing. Old

                    women wander from arches to see what this reach

                    

                    will reach. We start with the names of flowers sold

                    on the streets in the Quarter & the Marigny, peach-

                    colored, pink & red & blue-dyed flowers, white gold

                   

                    flowers named how they are named: Daisy, Bream,

                    Belle, Violet, Hyacinth & Myrtle, William, Iris, Reed, 

                    Sorrel & Olive, Lillie & Camellia, Rose, Red & Gleem.

                    We start with who they are & go to what they need.

One of my favorites, All the Time, is accompanied by Gingles’ painting by that name, an acrylic panel including scarlet forms resembling poppies in which Bourque presents Delille’s voice speaking about the work of the Sisters of the Holy Family: 

                       …We moved quietly from one need to another need

                       as we found it. We brought things inside our houses, kept our candles lit,

                       We let the world be the world, let the heart be heart, let creed be creed. 

This is one among many poems in the volume that show Bourque’s ability to achieve what A. E. Housman called “not the thing said but a way of saying it.”

Another poem in which Bourque imagines Delille speaking of her dedication to work with children of the New Orleans streets is the poignant:

The Difference Island 

              …My wings

              are who I am. They flew me to this difference island where I am no more

              a trace or line. We crossed bayous & bays & lakes & rivulets as fine as lace

              to this other world beyond geographies where I knew what I had to live for,

              the poor despised, the cipher bought and sold, what I saw in an orphan’s face.

Bourque used the titles of Gingles’ paintings for all of the poems in this volume and points to the language of the paintings as influencing the language of his poems. “Without these paintings I know I could not have accessed this particular set of poems spoken by the powerful and holy human being Henriette Delille is,” he writes in the acknowledgements to From the Other Side. I would add that Bourque’s deft gift of imagining the voice within the voice (“…What’s just beyond the tree leans on what we never knew we knew…”) influences the reader’s understanding of “the other side”and the art that takes us there. 

The Sisters of the Holy Family continue to carry out Delille’s mission in retirement homes, schools, and other sacred service organizations in New Orleans, Shreveport, Galveston, Little Rock, Washington, DC, in California, in Belize, and in Africa. Delille’s original prayer penned in French was a simple but cogent one: “I believe in God. I hope in God. I love. I want to live and die for God.”

Order from yellowflagpress.com or darrellbourque@gmail.com. 

THE CONUNDRUM

Couhig at work at The Conundrum

On a chilly Thanksgiving evening following turkey and too much food, we traveled to St. Francisville in search of an independent bookstore owned by Missy Couhig whom we had met when she represented the works of authors performing in a reading at the Festival of Words in Grand Coteau, Louisiana.

The bookstore’s name, “The Conundrum,” remains a conundrum in the sense that the reason for naming this bookstore after a riddle patrons can’t figure out isn’t apparent to me. However, I did figure out, rather quickly, that I’d met a master marketer of books. Couhig, who’ll travel anywhere to sell books and meet new authors, says the word “market” isn’t really consonant with her mission. “The mission is about sharing,” she says of her profession.

As director of three literary festivals, she touts authors in every discipline — fiction, poetry, children’s literature through three major events: The Walker Percy Weekend; Writers and Readers Symposium; and The Children’s Book Festival — all based in St. Francisville, Louisiana. 

“Bookstores are comfortable places,” she said. “If I see a bookstore, anywhere in the world, I’m going to enter it." She’s an esoteric reader, and it’s evident she’s fascinated with the idea of meeting writers “in person.”

Couhig retired from a position as executive manager of a pharmaceutical company, a job she had held for fifteen years before her husband, an attorney in New Orleans, came home one day and told her he had signed a lease on the building now housing The Conundrum (without her knowledge) in St. Francisville, Louisiana. He surprised her with the opportunity to pursue a profession as bookstore owner and manager — work for which she immediately showed a natural aptitude — and passion.

Although Couhig first majored in English at LSUNO (Louisiana State University in New Orleans), she received a degree in General Studies because she says she didn’t want to spend five semesters in French classes required in the English curriculum. “I love to read but have no desire to write,” she added.

Couhig arrived in St. Francisville on the heels of Hurricane Katrina when her husband, concerned about the safety of property belonging to his family, ended up buying a house in this small community of 1700 people. St. Francisville sits atop a ridge overlooking the Mississippi River and at one time provided the largest Mississippi River port between New Orleans and Memphis, Tennessee. Since the advent of the 21st century, the town has become a popular tourist destination for those who enjoy historic homes and southern culture.

Couhig’s maiden name, Aleman, denotes German descent, and her great grandfather settled in Napoleonville, Louisiana on a Spanish land grant. She spends half her time in New Orleans where she and her husband have one home and the other half in St. Francisville where they own another -- that is, when she isn’t on the road, searching for new authors and bookstores.

Couhig displaying Native Flora Louisiana: Watercolor Drawings by Margaret Stones

While talking with us, Couhig was busy inventorying shelves, opening shipments of books, serving other customers — doing some serious multi-tasking. And we could see why she wants to expand The Conundrum as she needs more space to house her plans for selling a wide range of new and used books, scheduling readings, directing festivals... and promoting books and authors she loves.

Photographs by Victoria Sullivan

SATSUMA SEASON

Satsumas in Simon's Grove

On a recent exploration of Cajun country, while meandering not too far from the chenier plains of southwest Louisiana, we reached the Prairie Complex area near Leroy, Louisiana where signs directed us to Simon’s Citrus Farm. “Serendipity,” I said to Vickie, my travel companion. And it was serendipity indeed — seven acres of Satsuma trees among 25 acres of navel oranges, kumquats, grapefruit, lemon, and Louisiana Sweets as the Louisiana brand of oranges are called. And at the risk of fast becoming a Louisiana Agricultural Ambassador or a “foodie” via my blogs, I hasten to laud the quality of the Louisiana Satsuma Orange, Brown Select variety. This delicious fruit is plentiful in the orchards of southwest Louisiana’s best-known citrus farm owned by Lynn Simon, a retired geologist and one-time owner of several oilfield operations.

Lynn Simon

The farm is located near Kaplan, Louisiana on Gladu Rd., and Simon says unless a traveler Googles directions, knows where he’s going, or follows the signage, he’s not likely to come to his place for a visit. Simon Citrus Farm does have an informative website, with directions to the farm location where Simon explains that he began planting Satsumas in 1996 as a hobby, and the hobby burgeoned into a 1000-tree orchard. With the help of Dr. Brown, a specialist on the staff of  the Louisiana State University Agriculture Center. he began growing the “Brown Select” Satsuma, the sweetest of all this fruit’s varieties. 

“Most of my clientele are Orientals,” he said. “A seedless, easy to peel orange is a favorite of the orange varieties, and we ship boxes everywhere.” He pointed to eight pallets holding boxes of Satsumas under a shed beside his offices. “I’m shipping these to Tennessee next week. We harvest every single piece of fruit by clipping,” he says, “which requires a lot of pickers, including restaurants and other businesses, as well as family.” Simon reported that freezes last January and February in Louisiana damaged some of the trees, but he usually produces 500 pounds per tree. “We market throughout the United States for retail, wholesale, and shipping clientele,” he added. 

The Satsuma fruit was reportedly growing in Japan over seven decades ago. In 1876 it was first introduced into Florida by George R. Hall, and in 1878, the fruit became popular in Louisiana. Simon reports that from 1908-1911, approximately one million “Owari” Satsuma trees were imported from Japan, and citrus farmers planted them in groves throughout the Gulf Coast states. By the 1890’s they had burgeoned into large-yielding crops. 

Old Simon Homestead shaded by live oaks

We noticed an old house next door to the Satsuma grove which seemed to be in the process of restoration and asked if we could tour it. Simon eagerly agreed to allow us to do so, and we learned that it’s the oldest house in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, dating back to 1865 when his great-grandfather lived in it. The house, built entirely with pegs, square nails, cypress walls and floors, is being restored to provide a bed-and-breakfast facility, and Simon and his wife are working on the restoration themselves. A talented and industrious couple, they also restore and build furniture that will decorate the old house. 

The visit that lasted for an hour with this engaging “retiree” provided us with two serendipitous tours, and we came away with a sack of Satsumas that are the sweetest Louisiana fruit I’ve yet tasted. October and November are prime months for these quality Satsumas, and we were happy to discover that they’re high in antioxidants and Vitamin C — just in time to ward off the winter flu season. 

Photographs by Victoria Sullivan

TURTLE SOUP

Art work by Paul Schexnayder

Yesterday, while riding along Hwy. 182 en route to New Iberia from Broussard, Louisiana, we whizzed past a ditch filled with water where a police car was parked. The police officer seemed to be arguing with a man holding a rope to which a turtle was tied. I only caught a glimpse of the turtle but could see the spiked shell and thick scaled tail of a huge alligator turtle. If I had satisfied my curiosity, I’d have asked the driver to stop, but thought I might get embroiled in some kind of endangered species argument. I’ve read that alligator turtles aren’t labeled as “endangered” in Louisiana right now, but they are over harvested for their meat. For all I know, the man holding the rope could have just caught his supper and was being chastised for fishing in a highway ditch. 

I’ve been interested in these primitive-looking turtles since I read that they were plentiful on Last Island during the 19th century and that their weight was reported to top 200-400 pounds. They also lived to be 50-100 years old. Several years ago, when I was writing The Kajun Kween, a young adult book, the alligator turtle became a challenge for Petite Marie Melancon, the heroine of a comic strip who caught one in a hoop net, and New Iberia’s famous local illustrator, Paul Schexnayder, painted a picture of her holding the critter by its tail.

Alligator turtles hardly ever come on land, except when the females want to lay their eggs, and November is the wrong season for egg laying, so I’m wondering why the turtle I saw ventured into a roadside ditch, unless the world was “too much with [her]” and she was near the 100-year old mark. After all, some hardy alligator turtles live to be several hundred years old, especially in southwest Louisiana.

According to Petite Marie, who read extensively before going on an adventure to catch an alligator turtle, in the 1800’s, a man named James Cathcart was sent to Last Island, Louisiana to survey timber suitable for making U.S. vessels, and he found fishermen catching 300-lb. turtles at the rate of five alligator turtles a day. They were selling them for $7 apiece and kept them in pens until buyers showed up. Petite Marie figured she’d be lucky if she caught a 50 pounder. However, she managed to net a huge one, and her fishing companions severed its head, placed it in a bucket of water, stuck a twig in its mouth, and the head clamped down on the twig. Petite tells us that the movement of the head was only a reflex but it must have been a frightening sight.

Of course, this is only a replay of a fictional account, but as we zoomed past the snapping turtle on a rope, I admit to being spooked enough not to turn my head for a backward glance. My mother often made turtle soup for her family of five children, but I think the turtle was probably a soft shell turtle my intrepid father had caught in the Bogue Chitto River and beheaded before he brought it home sans head for my mother to cook.

DUCK—CHICKEN SOUP?

I was eating a baked Cornish hen today, and the scent of it caused a Proustian event — the smell tugged at my memory of another poultry event I experienced while sojourning in Iran back when… My reminiscence involved Isabel, a tiny Portuguese woman who lived next door to me in Melli Rah subdivision — a woman who helped me overcome the first stages of culture shock. Her remedy for all forms of culture shock: paint walls. Five layers of white paint appeared over sickly green walls that an Iranian decorator had thought would please U.S. expatriates suffering from culture shock.

Isabel, the Portuguese neighbor, helped me paint away this condition of culture shock, and when I told her I wanted to repay the favor, she just shook her head and said in her enchanting  voice: “By George, just bring me the chicken soup if I ever get sick.”

A few weeks later, Isabel began to suffer from symptoms similar to a flu bug traveling through Melli Rah subdivision and telephoned me: “Go to the Ahwaz Super and bring back a big chicken,” she instructed. 

I hadn’t learned how to drive a shift auto and had to borrow my daughter’s six-speed bicycle to make the necessary trip to the grocery. I had no idea about the speed at which the bike should be set, but it must have been “quick, the chicken soup,” because I didn’t have a chance to pedal. The super speeder flung me down the pock-marked street in 120-degree weather, and I came to an ungraceful halt, over the handlebars, and into the jube near the supermarket. Fortunately, I was unharmed and went in the market to claim a chicken.

I remember that earlier that morning I had gone to my tin desk facing the street and penned a column entitled “Persian Poultry Pretty Paltry” for the Daily Iberian, the newspaper of note in my hometown of New Iberia, Louisiana. I’d been writing an “In A Persian Market” column for several months, and when I looked in the freezer at the market, I knew why I had written the column about Iranian poultry. Chicken Little appeared to be a shriveled version of the chickens raised in America, and worse still, she was frozen solid and would take some thawing before I could cook a pot of soup and bring it to Isabel.

When I returned on the super speeder bike and delivered the bird, Isabel took one look and burst into laughter. “I might have known not to send a Louisiana Cajun to the store for a chicken,” she said. “You Cajuns think that the only kind of fowl is a duck.  That is a duck — an Iranian duck — but still a duck, you rotten neighbor.”

No, I didn’t die of embarrassment. I hired a taxi that took me to the bazaar and found a real chicken, (still a bit undersized), then made soup. By early afternoon I was able to take the requested "cure for all ills" in a large pot to Isabel’s bedside. The following day, Larry, her husband, washed and returned the pot. A week later, I became sick with a flu-like illness, and Larry asked to borrow the pot, “perfect for making chicken soup,” he said. Evidently, Isabel had no trouble finding a chicken and boiling it — she brought me a steaming pot of soup. She also returned my large, American-made vessel. However, after I recouped, Isabel fell ill again, and I made another pot of soup for her. 

In desperation, Larry cleaned and returned the pot and complained. “I know you girls have the greatest intentions to cure one another,” he said, “but I think you’re passing the germ back and forth in the pot of chicken soup. Maybe you all are really cooking sick ducks, but for good health’s sake, please don’t try to doctor one another.” 

So, Isabel and I turned off the stove and, voila, we regained good health. And I haven’t had homemade a la Iranian/Cajun, Chicken/Duck soup since we returned to the States. Maybe we just needed a genuine Louisiana fowl from Gueydan, Louisiana — Duck Capitol of the World. 

Drawings by Diane Moore

The Amédé Ardoin Project

Amédé Ardoin
sculpture

Several hundred people honored Amédé Ardoin at the St. Landry Parish Visitor Center yesterday afternoon when a statue of this pioneer Creole musician, created by Sculptor Russell Whiting, was unveiled. The beautiful statue, made of carved steel in which Whiting used an oxy-gasoline torch, was inspired by the only known photograph of the talented La-La and Zydeco musician. It shows Ardoin standing on his accordion and holding a lemon that refers to the musician’s habit of carrying a lemon in his pocket to keep his high-pitched voice clear and strong.

Ardoin grew up near Eunice and Mamou and often played his accordion and sang for dances as a teenager. After joining up with the fiddler Dennis McGee, he made some of the earliest recordings from Acadiana for Columbia records, a total of 30 recordings. Stories of his death vary, but the best-known version is a tragic one that tells of a summer night when Ardoin performed for a barn dance somewhere in St. Landry parish, and a white woman handed him a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his face. Following the dance, he was beaten and run over many times by a Model A Ford driven by white men who objected to his exchange with the white woman. He was discovered lying in a ditch the following day and later admitted to the State mental hospital in Pineville, Louisiana where he died on November 3, 1942. He was buried in an unmarked grave.

A woman who was standing next to me at the unveiling told me that she was attending the commemorative ceremony because she felt that the event honoring Ardoin was a form of justice, and she had come to the Visitors Center to support the cause. The speakers included former poet laureate Darrell Bourque and Patricia Cravens who were prime movers of the Amédé Ardoin Project, a project that will continue to include a scholarship initiative supporting young artists who wish to study with Louisiana La-La and Zydeco musicians.

Russell Whiting, sculptor,
at the unveiling

Russell Whiting says of his Ardoin commemorative that he found the photograph of Ardoin endearing and identified with him as an artist who wanted his creations to survive. Whiting began his career as a metal worker in the oil industry, and his highly original work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. in private and public sculpture gardens. 

Poet Bourque displayed his book, if you abandon me, comment je vas faire, An Amédé Ardoin Songbook, published by Yellow Flag Press and now in its twelfth printing. He invited the audience to donate $10 for the book, which will support the Amédé Ardoin Project and urged communities and individuals to plant a lemon tree or grove in honor of Ardoin. Information about the lemon tree project can be obtained at darrellbourque@gmail.com or patriciacravins@gmail.com.

Although a few dark clouds hovered over the event, the rain did not fall on the unveiling, and Amédé Ardoin was “brought home” during a silent, respectful moment, followed by a celebratory Bal de Dimache Apres Midi.

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan