Une Pierre à Tonerre

Monsieur J.D. Soileau de L'anse Bleu always has something interesting to say. Today he was calling about a story he heard from a local lady about the meteorite that hit Louisiana in 1957. Click here for a piece on it from the Bayou Teche Dispatches.


 

Il onvait eu beaucoup peur dan 1957 à soir et là il a eu le meteorite qu'a frappé la Louisiane
Oh wow!
Et y a eu... son mari avait gardé dehors, il dit y a quek-chose, force té brillant et y a un clairité
un bout temp après on a attendu gros train... la maison a manière tremblé et ils on eu beaucoup peur et ils ont etait couché chez son père et sa mère.
Et beaucoup de monde avait beucoup peur et y'en a qu'a tombé à genoux.
Et un qui dit...cinq fois plus gros que le soleil et plue clair que la journée.
Comment tu crois?
Et ça frappait à la Côte Blanche là bas au long du côte le la Louisiane... parceque j'ai regardé sus mon computer et y'avait les pecheurs qu'était après pêcher au soir et ça était pleusieurs jours que leurs oreilles faisait manière mal, c'avait fait un gros train!
Comment tu crois!
Et là, y'avait un morceau qu'avait tombé sus un rig.
No kidding, wow!
Et dedans 1957... tu appelles ça une pierre à tonerre (thunder rock)!
une pierre à tonerre!
Ouais, c'est un meteorite...

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"Thunder Rock" reminded me of a story I heard from Mr. P. LaHaye recently about the Prairie des Femmes. It seems that years ago he and another researcher were walking around the indian sites in the Prairie and came upon a house at a curve in the road. They asked the woman, who may have been Chat-Tigre's mother, for water. She came out into the front yard and pumped it for them. They thanked her and tried to explain what they were doing by showing her the arrowheads they had found. She immediately motioned to the sky and called them something similar to "thunder rock" and said that they had come from the sky. 

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A Warning/ Un Advertisement

  

J.D. went on to say that the old people saw the meteorite as un advertisement, or a warning that something was going to happen. My research says that the meteorite came on March 15, 1957, the Ides of March, and Hurricane Audrey came in late June of the same year.

MaBlog

I began the Prairie des Femmes blogspot one year ago this month, and today, on the Feast of the Assumption, I have been thinking about what the project really is.

 

I began this blog at a time when I stopped teaching to stay home with my children and needed an outlet before I caved. My husband was touring and traveling a lot for work and I was alone in the Prairie des Femmes with two young children. Then there were many family changes including the deaths of beloved patriarch and matriarch and the unraveling that can follow. Around the same time, an article about our house came out in the New York Times (Click here for the article.) Feeling a little exposed, and in desperate need of a refuge, I began this blog spot (that I jokingly called "mablog" when talking to friends) in hopes that I could organize the information that I have always kept in journals about life in Louisiana, French, and family stories/local folklore. I wanted a place where I could share my writing and possibly provide a tool for other young Louisianians to learn about the Louisiana French language/culture from a younger person's perspective. I wanted to share the story of how I learned Louisiana French and the struggles of teaching it to my children and my students, as well as the things that helped me learn: friends, funny local French, lyrics, Sainte Anne, KVPI. I began the blog also as an excuse to research the history and origins of the name Prairie des Femmes, which is a real place where we really live. 

 

I had a want to capture what it really felt like to live here, in Saint Landry Parish, Louisiana in modern times. I wanted to capture a certain juxtaposition of the richness of the land and culture of the people, and the poverty of the system and the state amid hurricane, oilspill, crime, poverty. I wanted to document the beautiful things about out culture, the good things that have not dissipated, but have lived and changed and thrived, but I wanted to not make Louisiana or the PDF look like a utopian haven of beauty and culture, which it is, but it isn't. No place is perfect, not even Louisiana (and that's the only time I'll ever admit that). I wanted to explore the things that cloche- or that are croche- what it is like to drive down a littered dirt road lined with grottos to the Blessed Mother, next to a gorgeous but polluted bayou, while booming vulgar rap music, or maybe Cajun music. I wanted to capture the way that the old intersects with the new in this wild country.

Since I began the blog, it has grown into what it wanted to. I started making crazy French memes, ECards that explain French music lyrics. I have enjoyed translating some rap into Louisiana French, or doing cards on a Louisiana French rapper. I recorded and transcribed snips from the Tasse de Cafe Radio Program. I explored the oxbow woods and the most beautiful house in there; I hope to one day help save this jewel of Louisiana architecture. I started to explore the concept of the Prairie des Femmes, The history of this place being a refuge for women at different times for different reasons, and the mystery of the story of the Women's Indian Camp found here at the Prairie.  Just down the road from me my neighbors had two grottos to the Virgin Mary in their front yard- two Femmes- in the prairie. One day,  I stopped and asked to take a picture, and began a friendship with them. Then I took pictures of all the Mary statues in the Prairie des Femmes, Grand Coteau, Leonville... La Prairie des Femmes was revealing herself as a land whose people still venerate the Virgin Mother unquestioningly. As a balance to the beauty of this divine feminine, I started taking pictures of local car decals, vulgar and tacky slogans local boys emblazon on their mud-encrusted (or clean clean) trucks. I began taking seemingly mundane pictures of what was happening in Prairie at this very moment- a bridge out, a boy on a horse or a bunch of girls on a four wheeler (la prairie des femmes!).  I took pictures of goats and cattle blocking the road, a storm coming across the prairie on les jambes de pluie, the old houses crumbling in the woods or smoke rising from nearby fields. I transcribed wisdom from the neighbor, Chat-Tigre, or recorded the neighbor yelling at his cows in French and the other neighbor just yelling. I recorded gunshots, birdsounds, and the howl of the coyotes at night. I took pictures of the moon, the sunset and foggy sunrise, my children as they grew.

I have to thank my sweet husband on this Feast of the Assumption, for dragging me out here and leaving me to fend for myself in the PDF. I have learned a lot. I also thank the Blessed Mother for always leading me ever closer to God through the wilderness of the Prairie des Femmes.

 

Going to Grand Coteau

I didn't want to go to Grand Coteau. I didn't want to go make groceries, two toddlers in tow. It's too hard to get out of the Prairie des Femmes... but going into that historic and haunted town always gives its small rewards. It was a beautiful day, for starters, late May... next to the truck there was a big black moccasin in the bamboo. He jumped and went back into the leaves. On the road, a painted bunting flew across our path and landed on LaGranges' cattle gate at the roundup. At the front of the road the new neighbors were cooking in their carport on a Lil' Smokey. I stopped and asked it I could  take a picture of their tailgate: 

In Frozard, Chat-Tigre's brother's house was chillin as always...

Coming through the sloping highway into Grand Coteau, you undulate through all of the ranch lands until you climb the coteau into town. There, I saw three creole men on horseback: 

The third was in blue with a wide black cowboy hat. He waved.

In town, I stopped first at the Blue House Store, which, sadly, is going out of business. I has a pleasant conversation in French and English with the owner, Madame Patrice. I was looking for a new good journal, cause times are tight and long gone are the days of a Moleskine every two months... I have been using those cheap black and white marble tablets. Because of the closing, things were on sale at the Blue House, so I got myself a large Antoine de Saint-Exupéry journal, and also a smaller one with a clasp and a Blue Madonna on the front. I was even able to buy some Pacifica rose and amber soaps. Once, someone gave me one of those same soaps and I cut it into five slivers so that it would last. Now I got five bars!

At the gro, I also got good stuff, including a chicken stuffed with crawfish dressing, Evangeline Maid bread, green beans, coco pebbles, and pina colada mix. I even ran into the former poet laureate of Louisiana, Darrell Bourque whose new book, Megan's Guitar I am enjoying very much. He and his grandson Will were shopping for yams.  I was so proud of my son Ambrose, he responded in French when the poet said hello. I complimented Monsieur Bourque on the creative subject of the book, which expands the history of Acadian chief Beausoleil Broussard and also the Acadians' voyages to and settlement in Louisiana. A former teacher like myself, I could tell how pleased he was with the finished product. I told him how much I enjoyed hearing about his creative process when I saw him speak last week at his book opening. He told me: If you would have told me all those years ago that I would have written a book like that, I would never have believed it. 

And I believed it!