Prairie des Femmes : Exit 11

Showing posts with label Exit 11. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Monday, September 8, 2014

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Monday, December 9, 2013

Prairie Drama - Prairies and Coulees Episode 1

The prairies of Louisiana run one right next to the other along bayous like the Teche and the des Cannes, all lined up like neighbors and so of course, there is tons of drama dans le coin. There is overlap. They all know each other and everybody knows everything, every contour of their life. The bayous and coulees cut across the prairies and the prairies run along the bayous and you can imagine the tracas it causes.

So what I heard through the PrairieNet is that Prairie des Femmes used to date Prairie des Gros Chevreuil and it was perfect cause she was so bucksome and he was so strapping and loved to hunt and all, but they didn't work out once he converted his deer lease to pecan orchards and expected her to make pralines all the time.

So then Prairie des Femmes started going out with Prairie Laurent who lived right next door and had always had an eye for her, but he had been leading La Prairie Basse on for a while. Him and Femme would sometimes meet up at the trail ride and text while he was still with Basse and now Basse, she's so jalouse. To show him she went off and hadeyaed with L'Anse Belaire for a while when him and L'Anse Bleue and Grand Prairie used to roder. Come to find out she was textin Frozard the whole time, too, but he lives right across the Hwy 93 and she lost interest, too quiet and small. So Basse met up with Prairie des Gros Chevreuil, a real man in her opinion, and didn't care if he was calling himself Pecaniere or if all he wanted her to do was bake pecan pies. Prairie Basse likes pecan pies and pralines, too, and she can crank em out.

Then Laurent, of course, after a while with Prairie des Femmes, who wanted to get all mysterious and distant, started pinin' for his ex, Prairie Basse. Word is Laurent and her started rendez-vousing in the Opelousas Wal-Mart parking lot. Then Laurent's side chick, Plaisance, who's with Faubourg and they have one lil boy, Andrepont, found out and went off with LeBeau to make Laurent jealous but you gotta watch out because Laurent is boys with Exit 11 Posse and the Bellevues, so. Then LeBeau's woman, Nuba went bonkers and they got in a big brawl with the Prairies and the Coulees too in the Opelousas Walmart parking lot.

Poor ole Prarie des Femmes, she was mortified that Laurent had acted like that, so she's drowning her sorrows. Last I heard she was seen at the Silver Slipper with Bayou Portage and his boi Knotleyville.

The Dashing Prairie Laurent

Faubourg

Grand Prairie

La Belle Prairie des Femmes

LeBeau

Pecan Orchard, AKA Prairie Gros Chevreuil, Prairie of the Big DEER, Boiiiii

NUBA

Prairie Basse

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Exit 11 Update

When I started exploring love of place, no one taught me more than the EXIT 11 posse from Grand Coteau and "the Set". Exit 11 is also the exit for the PDF. I ride for Exit 11.

Roun hea!

Act like you aint catch dat

Time to turn up

POOSE MANE!!!!!

Mamas Cry in the PDF

White World

Friday, June 14, 2013

The Body of the Night

I got all caught up with some Prairie des Femmes stickers that I ordered and tagged the back of the stop sign at the southern entrance to the Prairie. A few hours later, in full regret of my harmless place identification /blatant vandalism, and after night fall, I ventured out into the dark to right my wrong before the sun came up.

Night in Prairie des Femmes is eerie no matter how you cut through it. It's Saint Landry Parish. There are dark, rank bayous and open fields, empty trailers and big trucks with strange blue lights. The roads are dirt, rutted, and there is lots of tall grass, fog, wild animals, party people and even the occasional ghost. Tonight, the sound of the frogs and crickets in the swamp is extra loud and silvery, and the humidity of the day makes the navy-blue air feel like a body itself, like the body of the night. Despite the heat, I wanted to hear my surroundings, so I drove slowly to the front of the road with the windows open. It was a heavily humid night, a Friday full of the electricity of the week's release. It was nearly moonless, and in the direction I drove, there was the faint mauve glow of far-off lightening. I rounded all of the curves, avoided the black dogs in the road, and as I came to the straightaway and Saule, where Delores used to live before she was killed back there, I saw this short pole with some kind of signs on it, right there at the T. It was all white and just standing there. I was immediately taken back to the early morning when Delores really was standing there, hitchhiking her way to school. It was like when I saw her then. I shook it off, but around the next curve and where the dirt road meets the bayou, I saw what looked like people walking on the side of the road toward me. They were trudging. I imagined that there was an old woman in front in a long, Civil-war-ish dress, and maybe a few other women, and a man, too. As I approached, though, I could see that these "people" were actually the wispy tall weeds that were shooting up off of the dirt road.

The spooky feeling just wouldn't leave me, so I was relieved when I pulled up at the juncture of road and highway at Frozard, near le Beau Chene, and no cars were coming either way. I stopped and opened the door when I saw someone or something standing on the other side of the highway. They were wearing a green shirt with a white covering over their head. It was after nine at night on a dark and somewhat busy highway. This intersection is an old cross roads, about halfway between the towns of Arnaudville and Grand Coteau, so it seemed that this person was waiting for a ride into town. That is what it seemed. There is an old pink store there, but there are never people standing there. In all my years of living here, this was the first I had seen of it. I did not dare get down, now, so I turned around and made a few passes. Every time, the "apparition" was there, as unknowing cars zoomed by on the dark highway that acts as a modern portage between the well-lit interstate at Exit 11 and the dark back country of the Prairie des Femmes.

The Apparition

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: