CAJUN SURVIVAL IN A CRAZY WORLD…

Dusting bookshelves is a hazardous task. Before you realize it, you’re not moving dust around but are halfway through the second reading of a good book you’ve discovered on the shelves. Yesterday, I indulged in this diversion from dusting when I found one of Greg Guirard’s books, Psycho Therapy for Cajuns, subtitled A Traditional Culture Struggles for Survival in a Crazy World. I usually place Greg’s books on my coffee table so that visiting Sewaneeans can take a look at his photographs and text about the Atchafalaya Basin and surrounding environs—can “pass a good time” reading about the Cajun culture.

Somehow, Psycho Therapy was placed among the volumes of poetry I transferred from Louisiana to Sewanee, Tennessee so that I wouldn’t be without all those poets who feed my Muse daily. Actually, the poetry shelf was a fitting place for Greg’s book; e.g., the writing by Sheryl St. Germain, whose essays and prose poems in the volume are lyrical cameos about her Cajun origins. Also featured is the noteworthy work of poet Sidney M. Creaghan of Lafayette, complete with a drawing. Sidney introduces readers to one of Louisiana’s waders, the Great Blue Heron (“like Mahatma Gandhi/his legs are sinew and ligament/like Gandhi/he knows how /to hold still…”)

Greg’s introduction to Psycho Therapy for Cajuns is an outcry against contemporary society’s values and expectations, and he presents the plight of Cajuns who have remained connected with the “big woods and the water…the real Cajuns, I like to call them…[who] are suffering from an identity crisis of major proportions…true Cajuns who revere their traditions and their identity [and who believe] if we’re not having fun, we’re wasting our lives…”

Greg also describes a Cajun as someone who has one foot on shore and one on the boat, who can’t decide whether it’d be better to jump on the boat or jump back on land. He presents vignettes about weavers of hoopnets, crawfishermen, duck hunters, oyster shuckers, along with photographs of giant snapping turtles and of the faces of seasoned Cajuns who still live on the water. He includes a special treatise on language and the perversion of it—and not necessarily by Cajuns!

One of my favorite anecdotes in Psycho Therapy is about legendary Pat Rickels, who taught English and coordinated the Honors Program at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette for decades. Pat was also a famed folklorist and had an abundant store of Cajun lore. According to Greg, when she was a graduate student at LSU, she lived next door to a Cajun couple with a six-month old baby. Pat discovered one day that the baby was feeding on a bottle filled with brown liquid in it, rather than milk, and the mother paused to shake it up every few minutes. “What’s in the bottle and why do you keep shaking it?” Pat asked the mother. “Well, it’s gumbo,” the mother replied. “I strained it but have to shake it because all the pepper settles in the bottom.” Greg relates that it was then that Pat, who wasn't from Louisiana, realized that she was in another country!

Poo yii, it’s a red pepper world down there, and Greg believes that “every true Cajun dreams of returning to a life in the big woods, close to a bayou or river or swamp, growing his/her vegetables and fruit, catching and hunting for his/her fish and meat, leaving the stress of city/suburban life behind, with all its conveniences, comforts…and hassles.”

You can read about Greg and his books, posters, cards, and prints by going online at www.gregguirard.com. And I’ve moved Psycho Therapy to the coffee table.

A GARDENER ON ‘THE MOUNTAIN”—CLAUDIA PORTER

If you travel south on a shady highway toward Sherwood, Tennessee, passing St. Mary’s Convent of Sewanee along the way, and turn right into Carriage Lane, you’re likely to see Claudia Porter wielding a hoe in either her vegetable garden or backyard flower garden. She’s tending her crops after the example of her father, who was a cotton farmer, and her grandmother “who spent a lifetime 'in the yard' as they say in Clarksdale, Mississippi,” Claudia explained.

Claudia says that because of her father who farmed cotton, corn, soybeans, and peanuts on 2,000 acres in the rich Delta of Mississippi, she has “dirt in her blood,”... along with a green thumb inherited from her grandmother. That thumb cultivates potatoes, squash, butter beans, purple hull peas, blueberries, green peas, sugar snap peas, asparagus, kale, as well as a small herb garden on 2 ½ acres the Porters own. Joe, a retired Episcopal priest, usually helps Claudia “put in” the garden but she’s its major caretaker.

Claudia likes the look of English cottage gardens and says most of her plants have been “pass-alongs.” She has a plethora of daylilies, knock-out roses, and perennials. Recently, she planted wisteria on a pergola of the patio, where she and Joe can sit and breathe in a scent that replaces gardenia plants they cultivated in their Memphis garden. Visitors are invited to sit in the living room where French doors open onto a glassed-in porch overlooking the flower garden and watch goldfinches dart to and away from the bird feeder by the back door.

“My grandmother tended plants, dressed in her house dress and bedroom slippers, and spent most of her life gardening and raising five children,” Claudia said. “We always had a garden, but I didn’t really have one of my own until Joe and I married. Despite the fact that I’ve always gardened, I was frustrated with the small space I had for a garden until we moved here and I was able to have this large garden, which is labor intensive I might add.” Both the Porters miss the heavenly scent of gardenia plants they cultivated in Memphis, Tennessee where Joe last served as a minister at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.

Claudia recently made a presentation about gardening opportunities in the St. Mary Conference Center area at the Associates of St. Mary Convent's Annual Retreat, emphasizing that the St. Mary’s Conference Center Prayer Garden needs weeders for plots of lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, and flowers. The Prayer Garden is supervised by Michael Thompson, an oblate of the Roman Catholic Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia, who came to St. Mary’s Conference Center, Sewanee primarily to develop a prayer garden. The garden, a fenced in property, is used as meditative space but also functions as a vegetable garden. Produce grown there has been donated to outreach programs, such as the Community Action Center sponsored by Otey Episcopal Church.

“Michael’s vision is for a large-scale garden, including berry plants, fruit trees; he's even considering small-scale farming,” Claudia said. She frequents the St. Mary's garden often but insists that she’s just a worker bee. Once a month, Claudia puts on her St. Flacre (or Fiacre) T-shirt (patron saint of gardening) and carries out additional worker bee activity at Otey Episcopal Church. She’s also a member of the Sewanee Garden Club and attends all workshops about gardening in Tennessee available to her.

A person of unique humility, Claudia nourishes her spiritual life with gardening and with her work as a companion of Rivendell Community, in Dunnegan, Missouri, a prayer and hospitality group of which she became a member while living in Memphis. It’s an official spiritual community in the Episcopal Church led by a group of women priests who embrace the Benedictine Way of Life. Claudia attends the organization's get-togethers annually, and on Saturday nights, she joins a group of seekers of the spiritual life at St. Joseph’s, St. Mary’s Conference Center, Sewanee, who're interested in the Benedictine Way, sharing Evensong, a meal, a discussion on the Benedictine Way (led by Michael Thompson), Lectio Divina, and Compline.

The walls of the Porter home are decorated with icons and religious pictures. Books by Esther de Waal and volumes about gardening lie on small tables in the living room. Claudia claims their home has the ambience of a retired priest because most of the paintings and icons were donated by former parishioners, but it’s a home that visitors feel is a sacred space. It's also a place of conviviality—the Porters like to entertain and have fun...and, of course, to show off (and share) their garden produce.

“Gardening for me is a spiritual thing,” Claudia says. “It’s fulfilling and comforting. As part of the Rivendell Rule, I consider my gardening as silent prayer—a way of connecting with God.”

SILENCE NEVER BETRAYS

Many years ago, I discovered a maxim that has remained among my favorite quotations, a saying attributed to a Chinese philosopher who penned the line, “Silence is a true thing and never betrays.”   The image of an old live oak voicing this statement always comes to mind when I read the words that became the last sentence of a book I’ve written entitled SILENCE NEVER BETRAYS.  It’s my latest novel, an ebook released by Border Press this past week on 14 June.

The dark novel is set in bayou country, Louisiana and centers on an old mansion and its owner, Hadrian Boswell, an eccentric who gains notoriety as a mischief maker and whose last mischief before dying involves voodoo houngans.  It’s a story with the steamy ingredients of a southern Gothic: house guests who are frightened out of their sleep by Hadrian; a wild boat ride with Hadrian steering a rowboat in darkness at Last Island, Louisiana; Waverly, the spurned wife of Hadrian who vows vengeance because Hadrian refuses to consummate their marriage; King, a manservant who has ambivalent feelings about his eccentric employer and wishes to kill him; and Joseph, a young artist who moves into the mansion but resents Hadrian’s patronage. The surprise ending includes a scientific discovery and a strange transformation in Hadrian’s behavior that eclipses his past eccentricity.

One publisher who reviewed the manuscript of SILENCE NEVER BETRAYS wrote that he envisioned a movie being made of the story.  Well, HUSH... HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE was filmed nearby on the old River Road in Louisiana!

This is an e-book with a handsome cover, the photograph rendered by Victoria Sullivan (author of Adoption) and designed by Martin Romero, my grandson.  Click on http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/66678 to download  a novel that underlines the idea that if all those ancient live oaks in Louisiana could speak, they’d tell some dark stories…however SILENCE NEVER BETRAYS!