Prairie des Femmes : Green Pears in Leonville

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Green Pears in Leonville

As my old student Mlle LeMelle used to say. "Nothin's happenin in Leonville. You go to church, you go home." Technically, Leonville is the closest town to the PDF, but I don't often go there lately, mostly because the bridge leading there was out for six months, and because sometimes the big stores up on the Interstate have more selection and fresh fruit. But sometimes you don't want selection or the freshest fruit. Selection is overwhelming and say you want just good old fruit, trucked back on the Teche and displayed at the Marche. On those days, I retreat back into Teche Country, not to the busy Exit 11. Yesterday, I had a sick child and a fussy baby and we were out of milk. It was almost 5 and I wanted to be back home for my afternoon coffee and world news with Diane Sawyer, which is like religion to me. So, at the end of the driveway, I decided today would be a quick trip to Leonville, to the right, through the open fields of Pointe Claire.

On the way, there is my favorite little homestead: it is a little white house with a blue roof and red truck in the driveway. It is surrounded by the green fields along Jules LaGrange. In the ditch are a big clump of red flowering ginger and in the side yard are hand painted statues of Jesus and Mary. Their house reminds me of the cardinals that swoop across the road along the bayou:

The town of Leonville itself is a little like a 1940's ghost town. A few hundred people live in quiet, neat houses and trailers, and otherwise, abandoned white structures line the streets. Even the brown Teche flows quietly through with none of the fanfare you would find over it in a place like Arnaudville. At the heart of Leonville is Champagne's grocery, flanked by Leonville Elementary on one side and the rounded bell tower of St. Leo's Church on the other. Inside I recognized a few of my old students and their growing siblings. I am always greeted with a "Bonjour Madame", even though I only taught French at the high school for five years and haven't taught in three.

D'après moi, Champagnes' Marche' is the perfect local grocery store. They had home-grown cantaloupes, perfectly portioned packs of green beans, soft loaves of sausage-jalapeno-cheese bread and giant boxes of Little Debbie Snacks. I got a six-pack of glass bottle cokes. I especially enjoyed picking out four green pears, whose green color and form seemed to belong in some mystical way to the very fiber of grey Leonville.

In the parking lot, I saw a plainclothes Father Ken Domingue walk in, red shirt, smiling. He had taught me as a teenager at Sacred Heart in Ville Platte. Other people were pumping gas. There were dark, thin men with their sons, blonde mothers with children, more of my students, and an old couple talking in French. The church bells gonged the half hour. People were going home.

Near the silos at Mark's Bridge, Mister Simon, expert snake killer and father to les belles filles Stelly was crossing the road near his lovely oak-shaded home on the Coulee. I pulled over briefly to tell him Hey, I almost called you earlier! I had a six foot chicken snake in my cabanne! He laughed. I told him that it got away, and I wanted to use my pistol, but there was cement in the cabanne, and would it ricochet? As I saw a black truck coming up behind me from the fields, Mister Simon said, Oh no, you don't wanna do dat, it'll ricochet bad! and as I drove away, he waved and laughed, Don't do dat!!

Mista Simon, masta snake killa and awesome neighbor! Pic by M. Stelly

Further up the road, where the new houses (!) are being built, there was my old student the PDF Gazette and another neighbor, Tante Claire, visiting in the yard. I took the chance to pull over, visit for a minute, en Francais meme! and take a couple pictures of the double (triple) Mary Statues in their yard. It was nice to get to talk to the neighbors. I even saw something at their place that I never saw before: