HURRICANES AGAIN

Illustration by Paul Schexnayder for
The Kajun Kween

Hurricane Isaac is casting his wet shadow on my home state of Louisiana where I live part of the year when I’m not residing on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. Like many Louisiana residents, I remember Katrina and her destructive effects on people and property in the bayou country. For six weeks following that killer storm, I directed a clothing operation at Solomon House, an outreach mission of the Episcopal Church of Epiphany in New Iberia, and ministered to those who escaped the deluge in New Orleans, seeking higher ground in Acadiana.

Although New Iberia has not felt Isaac so far, I cringe when I think of the violent whirlwinds that have disturbed Acadiana in the past. New Iberians live near the Gulf of Mexico, a relatively shallow body of water with no chilling ocean currents running through it, and this shallow depth allows water to heat up to 85 degrees in the summer, so that the warm water can spawn a hurricane at approximately 80 degrees. As the heat from condensation causes the air in a hurricane to rise rapidly, the hurricane becomes a big wheel containing turbulent winds. And devastation occurs.

As far back as 1722, a hurricane demolished the new settlement of New Orleans, and one of the most memorable hurricanes was the storm on August 10, 1856 that struck Isle Dernier or Last Island. This hurricane caused high storm tides, killing hundreds of people reveling at a dance in a hotel called “The Trade Winds” and destroying every building on the island, as well as most of its vegetation. The devastation inspired the famous novel, Chita, by Lafcadio Hearn. Today, Last Island is an uninhabited beach containing little vegetation.

Hurricanes appear in three of my Young Adult fiction books and provide active settings that derive from my experiences of major hurricanes that struck New Iberia–Hilda, Betsy, and the worst, Andrew, when I sat huddled in my home while the wind vibrated the walls of my house like a giant accordion.

One of the lighter treatments of a hurricane occurs in my YA book, The Kajun Kween, in which the heroine, Petite Marie Melancon, ties herself to a tree to experience the Big Wind so that she can provide a story for a comic strip publisher. (However, this narrative is not intended as a jest to minimize the severity of hurricanes –in fact, it emphasizes the foolishness of Petite Marie.) Before Petite goes outside to experience this childish adventure (unbeknownst to her parents), a discussion of hurricanes takes place at the supper table, and Petite shows off her knowledge of hurricanes to her Papa: “Wizards in Finland used to sell wind to seamen. The wind was inside of three knots,” she says. “If someone untied the first knot, a small wind came up. If he untied the second knot, half a gale blew, and if he untied the third knot, a hurricane blew in. I read that seamen in the Shetland Islands still buy knotted handkerchiefs from old women to control the storms…”

Papa Melancon bests Petite’s story with one of his own. He claims that at one time when hurricanes blew in, Sumatrans ran from their houses armed with swords and lances to cut up the winds. Petite’s papa explains that the word “huracan,” which means “God of All Evil,” is derived from Indian tribes in the Caribbean, the Tainos, who thought that on many occasions Huracan got angry with them and tried to blow them away. You’ll have to read what happens to Petite Marie Melancon during her hurricane adventure in The Kajun Kween, but I don’t advise anyone to test the intensity of the Big Wind, as Petite attempted to do.

Meanwhile, we assume the position of “hunkering down” in sympathy with our Louisiana friends and family and pray that Isaac will take his winds to some other body of water or deserted island, settling his terrible rotary disturbances there.

The illustration at the beginning of this blog is a clip from a drawing by Paul Schexnayder, New Iberia artist, and appears in The KajunKween.

PORCH SITTING AND MINT

Porch at Sewanee

Each evening in late summer, we schedule porch sitting time, a time when we relax and enjoy slight breezes while sitting in the shade of enormous oaks and a lone maple tree.  Our front porch in Sewanee, Tennessee is actually a back porch facing the woods on our property and is a far cry from the broad gallery of my grandmother’s day. 

Grandmother Nell’s gallery was a wrap-around porch that held tall-backed rockers, pots of pale green Boston fern, and a green slat-backed swing that creaked when we pushed it back and forth with our bare feet.  From the vantage point of that porch, my grandmother could see everyone who drove by on Tenth Avenue, or walked on the sidewalk in front of her Victorian house with its cupola that boasted one stained glass window.  Those “passings” supplied topics for evening conversations.

Our very small Sewanee porch with its plethora of wrought iron is a place where we sit in late evening to garner a bit of peace and to listen to cicadas, crickets, and tree frogs, all singing in a monotonous cadence, a summons to enjoy nature’s plainchants.  Also, in late summer, the distant cries of boys practicing football on the university field pierce the quiet of our porch sit, announcing that Fall is about to commence.  As E. B. White once quoted from Thoreau: “…slight sound[s] at evening lift me up by the ears, and make life seem inexpressibly serene and grand…”

Porches of any kind incite nostalgia in me, remind me of evenings at some outdoor retreat where cool drinks are served and of the old custom of serving mint juleps on the verandah at Belmont Plantation in New Iberia, Louisiana.  On the long porch, painted a forest green, at 5 p.m. daily, the Wyche family gathered with friends for evening libations and to tell family stories or to discuss politics, food, and books.  I might add, there was never any silence.  “Big Jimmy’s” special mint julep held a sprig from his own patch, and he claimed that if a man couldn’t grow the plant, he was hen-pecked.  I have no clue regarding the origin of this story, nor do I understand why a man’s ability to grow mint depends on his relationship with his wife.

While thinking about Jimmy’s cool libation, I remembered my father’s love of mint and the many patches he had grown near the porches in my childhood, and even into adulthood, the last patch being beside a screen porch in Franklinton, Louisiana.  During my father’s demise, he sat on that porch daily, winter or summer, a melancholy figure looking out at his backyard garden of pole beans, tomatoes, lettuce, and field peas, silent and suffering from the lung cancer that would take his life.  In several of the books I’ve written, I mention that he did indulge in sudden outbursts while sitting on the screened porch – recitations of “Invictus,” in which he claimed he was the “master of his fate, and the captain of his soul,” believing that he could control both his life and the time of his death.  He was wrong, of course.

View of woods from porch

While sitting on my Sewanee porch this morning, I enjoyed 68 degree weather and proofed my new book of poetry, Everything Is Blue, now in press.  One of the poems is about mint, and several excerpts from the long poem seem to belong with this blog:




IN MEMORY OF MINT (verses one, two, five, and six of six verses)

It was not a sentimental act –
planting the mint
although my father planted a patch
every place we lived,
every time we moved,
and the underground runners
took over our backyards,
a space of its own forever.

He would have liked modernity

and what it has claimed

for the use of mint:

mint rubbing,

otherwise known as wasting time,

a way of achieving peace and calm,

rubbing mint leaves

between the fingers for two hours,

a scent, sweet and aromatic,

hovering above the head,

relaxing the brain.

I suppose mint symbolizes indolence,

the long plantation porch

and between the white columns,

a wicker table holding glasses

beaded with condensation,

filled with bourbon, ice, sugar,

a mint leaf drooping from frosted rims.

Porch sitting, mint rubbing, wasting time,

always the easy air of summer,

bees droning around a plant

pungent enough to defy my querulous line:

“it was not a sentimental act,”

as I bend to break a leaf,

rubbing it between my fingers,

a sacred but trivial salute

to my father.

AN ORGANIC PRAYER GARDEN

Ora et Labora

In the Benedictine Rule, physical work is a part of the daily discipline the Religious follow, for St. Benedict, who was touted as the founder of western monasticism, knew that a person couldn’t spend every hour of a day studying and praying. He felt that monks, nuns, brothers, and sisters should perform tasks like baking bread, cleaning up the kitchen, cooking, or working the ground to produce food that would sustain the Order and the needy who came to the doors of the monastery. This work wasn’t isolated from worship and was communal in context. Also, St. Benedict expected the Religious to be good stewards. He believed that a person could find God in work, and if that individual used his hands to carry out a physical task, he’d be involved in the act of praising God. Esther de Waal, renowned author of books about the Benedictine way of life, writes:

 “So that in all things God may be glorified is the common end of all work in the monastery. If the only point of reference is self, then work can easily become all engrossing, sometimes fulfilling, sometimes destructive, but either way is a barrier from God…”

And she tells us that those who followed the Rule approached work in the same way that they approached their possessions for “what we have and what we do belong to the life on loan from God…”

At St. Mary’s Convent, Sewanee, Tennessee, where we worship when we sojourn on The Mountain, the Sisters of St. Mary observe the Benedictine Rule in the same manner as St. Benedict’s early followers – praying at prescribed times during the day and studying scripture. And in the realm of work, they cook, preserve food, clean the kitchen, offer hospitality to those from the outside world who worship with them, (as well as to dogs and cats) and raise vegetables and fruit for their table and for the tables of the needy. They have always maintained a garden, and at one time, their work included raising cattle.

Just last week, The Sisters were awarded a grant by the Jessie Ball DuPont Foundation to support a project called the Organic Prayer Project, a joint effort between the Center for Religion and the Environment at the University of the South and the Sisters of St. Mary, Sewanee. Under the direction of Michael Thompson, a Benedictine oblate, the grant will allow the Sisters to expand their vegetable and meditation gardens by providing funds for a well, drip irrigation, and for seeds and plants.

“The grant will allow us to upgrade our kitchen so we will be able to can garden produce on a greater scale and to make a meditation trail/wildlife sanctuary on our property off St. Mary’s Lane,” said Sr. Julian, sister-in-charge of St. Mary’s. In 2013, the Sisters plan to maintain a pasture and a barn, and to provide feed for sheep, alpaca, and, perhaps, goats.

Healthy late summer crop 

“A goal of the Organic Prayer Project is to generate love and respect for God’s creation and to look at ideas such as sustainability and good stewardship of the earth,” Sr. Julian added. “The project will provide hands-on experience for students involved with the Center for Religion and Environment and hopefully for the Episcopal Service Corps. It will also provide opportunities for individuals and groups, such as seminary students, to prayerfully encounter God’s creation. We plan to use the site for formal retreats.” Another goal of the project is to generate income from sale of canned goods, wool/yarn, and cheese.

“We hope to widen our involvement with, and service to, our community of Sewanee and the wider world, and at the same time provide a solid financial structure for the convent,” Sister Julian said.

For those of us who aren’t savvy about organic gardening, the phrase means to improve and maximize the health of the garden soil and to produce healthy plants without using synthetic commercial fertilizers, fungicides, or pesticides.

Congratulations and kudos to the Sisters for obtaining this grant and for making all of us in the post-modern world aware of St. Benedict’s Rule regarding the stewardship of the earth.