Lila Grace Journal with the Plastic Pouch

Subjects covered in my Lila Grace spiral journal with the clear plastic pocket on the front that my nanny gave me for Christmas that I wasn't sure that I'd use but now I can barely part with:

January 12  2026- 

1 page of prep for Louisiana Folklore Society Meeting

Pixelated PDF Star

The PDF blog was begun anonymously as an online representation of a liminal-real place

Feb 23

Notes on the Bayou Culture Collaborative presentation

Sacred Heart Faculty Retreat, notes and quotes by Sister Karem, RSCJ

The spirit drove Jesus into the desert.

Seeds that God has planted will sprout.

March 

Planning Notes for Jazz Fest demonstration 

"Je t'espère comme j'espère le printemps"

Pony Bradshaw lyrics

Narrative 

Yeat's muse Maud Gonne

My Spring Desire Path

I saw Chiron on the PDF road

Houston Color Factory confetti, ephemera, still holds the audio to Solange's "Losing You"

Things in which he was present in the Houston Museum of Natural Science

Poetry/narrative

April 

La Semaine Sainte at school

pearls of sap, a racine-coeur par Ariste

Point Blue Toile

"Every writer gets a toothache, it's a threshold." Shome

Comment on a nettoyé le poisson avec de la mousse espagnol

Pock-Pock talk with K-4

A note from Sarah H when she gave me fresh eggs

A blue runner in the garden

"Walt Whitman on the moon" article

Rose de Marais, symbolism of the Prairie des Femmes

"Baton Rouge owes its name to the Houma tribe" article

"Sometimes I dream to the beat of Carolina" Calico Jim

Music recital paper for the boys

A blue runner in the cardinal nest 

Prep list for Jazz Fest folklife village 

Abyssus abyssum invocat

Notes on Jazzfest, names of people I met there

"Sacred is Secret"

The relationship between Mary Magdalene and mamou seeds

May

Invocations of May 1 list

Swamp Rose hydrosol

Photos of Jazz fest 

Notes on Chikashshanompa

Printed notes on Florida Ethnobotany

Narrative and notes on water birds, bee balm

A dream of a tent

Ahalla'ta'

List of Chickasaw names for native plants I use 

Narrative on first cherries I picked

Lightening Pine

Medicines I made in early May

Laudate Chrism essence

A may-haw sweet dough pie at Congé

Indian Perfume 

Meeting with a beekeeper under the oaks, he was poisoning black invasive bees

Berchman's ground breaking ceremony on the coteau

Printed List of my 40 Zines

I spoke the old languages to the cherry tree

Notes on ephemeral perfumes of rainwater and gardenia, roses from the Sacred Heart gardens

Notes on the Cajun Prairie by Malcom Vidrine 

We'd go to Pictou Island and we'd sleep

Notes on the Arnaudville French table and Dr. Barry Ancelet and Jean Arceneaux's new book Jamais Assez de Becs

"J'aime voir la marque sur la page" il dit

"Even the idea of prairie was lost...the prairie as a long disappeared idea." Vidrine

Catalpa Tree notes

A seal from Mal's letter

Poetic block list of assorted characters

Creole Magic Fishing lure

Billy's pepper jack boudin ball and roll up stickers

Bob Borel's Mom Mom's The Sacred Ordinary

Barras, Eastin and Labbe' Notes from La Table de St Martinville

Dried tarragon from Tante Moune's garden

Red Shoes Meeting notes

Lewis and Clark's notes on October 16th, Women's Creek and Girl's Creek 

Memories of May 1

 When I was a girl I read in a Susan Branch book about the folkloric belief in the healing and beautifying powers imbued in the dew of May 1st. Since then it's been thirty years,  and I have made a point to celebrate May 1st by touching the dew, gathering flowers, crowning Mary and eventually collecting ounces of dew in bottles and pyrex measuring cups. 

Images from my Instagram Memory entitled "May 1"

Wooden Marian shrine nailed to a flowering tree
Dew drops in blue bottles
May 1st by Beach Fossils
A dark recess in the bamboo provides a vignette for a suspended stick,
wrapped by a dead vine like a snake
Black rubber boots and a white April Cornell nightgown
Three miniature bottles of dew on the windowsill, corked
Recipe for Beltane lemonade
Cottonmouth vertebrae, painted gold, used as a crown
Deer tracks and tufts of hair in the cracked, muddy, entrance to the woods
A sighting of a centaur on the dirt road
Sandals with iridescent straps on the cypress porch
A turreted castle surrounded by lilac flowering bushes
A carpet of purple prairie verbena along the dirt road
Multi faceted crystal bottle of May dew with stopper
Thistle sprite
Giant wisteria bunch in the woods we called "our mistletoe"
An aproned woman disappearing into the darkness of the woods, surrounded by fireflies
A fresh bottle of dew with roses
Touching a drop of dew on the cattle fence
White dress and overlay doublet tied twice at the waist
May crowning and goûter at the Academy atop the Holy Coteau
Singing the Magnificat in rounds
Touching the dew that remained in the pine shadow to our faces 
Self-heal flowering on my path
Procession and bouquet of blue Louisiana irises for Mater
Pink, light blue and white linen, a light blue cameo
Fresh swamp roses, a prairie painting 
Marius plays the Mardi Gras song, adds a minor harmony
Blue pool, a clean journal page
Elderflower tops floating in the water

Vale Rosa Palustris

 Vale Rosa Palustris

Swamp Rose season comes with the arrival of the painted bunting's persistent song, blue cardinal eggs in the blackberry bush, red Mamou flower shoots, mulberry trees in full fruit. Both the male and female cardinals tend the nest. The mama bird is so intelligent. She has made her nest in a little Celeste fig tree overtaken by blackberry vines. Within the protection of the blackberry bush’s thorny cage, all surrounded with red and green fruit, her nest is suspended. It is next to a blue kiddie pool of fresh water and a few feet from a mulberry tree in full ripeness. There was a big storm from the west last night and the sound of the rain on the metal roof woke me up at midnight and just before sunrise. I wondered how the mama cardinal protected her three baby birds, and imagined she did so with her wings. The rain turned the nasturtium yellow. I repotted it. I am tending a small garden edged with unused firewood and filled with compost from the Saint Landry Parish landfill. There is a blue runner who visits the garden. Daily I check the cardinal nest and the swamp rose blossoms. Often I have to balance myself on an old bathtub covered in honeysuckle vines in the side yard to reach some of the roses before they fall. This year they traveled up the bamboo, so some blossoms are 15 feet up. Their scent is like baby powder, water, citrus, rose and pink pepper. The chirp of the cardinals and the song of the painted bunting always accompany my gathering. This morning there was a big swamp rabbit in the white clover I observed as I pulled out a loaf of bread I had risen all night from the oven. I'll have to leave prairie in a few days to go to New Orleans and reveal myself by speaking about Prairie des Femmes at the Jazz Fest folk like village. I'll miss the observation of the cardinals, the painted bunting's song, the gathering of the swamp roses and ceremonial dew on the morning of May first, as well as the ritual procession and May crowning of Mary at the Academy on the coteau. The girls will wear white and silently process to crown Mater with flowers. We present her with a bouquet of blue Louisiana irises at the grotto while we sing the Magnificat in rounds.

Update: When I got home from running errands, I heard the incessant  alarm chirping of the cardinals. I ran to the back yard to see the bluerunner standing up fighting the mother cardinal. I scared it off and ran for the shovel, but it was too late, he had gotten one chick and knocked the others out of the nest. I pushed him a few times, in efforts to scare him, with the shovel and it worked. I returned the babies back to the nest with one swoop of my spade, but it was futile. The snake was incessant and came back over and over until we had to let nature take its course. Afterwards I checked the ground to find three cardinal feathers. I listened to the daddy cardinal at the top of a sweet gum tree, a red spot, singing that lonesome song until dusk. That was the first time I understood what Miss Maryanne meant when she talked about the Cardinal Blues, that lonesome sound. 

Quand ils disent,

"C'est p'us pareil!"

Mais ça me donne les blues

D'attendre les cardinaux 

après chanter

The Enchanted Prairie des Femmes

And have you seen the dragon who guards the bridge at Frozard?

I knew the Prairie des Femmes was enchanted because she was so unassuming, and so one day we set out across Monsieur Vacheur's  back pastures and then on to the other side, where there is a little grove of trees in a small l'anse of the prairie. There we found all kinds of evidence of fairy activity: acorn caps fashioned into hats and piles of hickory nuts like pyramids, the abandoned wings of the demoiselle fly, their forlorn iridescence catching my eye. There were spider webs along the ground (the tiny elves like to take their morning drink from the dew that gathers in droplets) and mossy green couches where they reclined in the roots of a cypress tree. There were new leaves freshly impaled on twigs scattered about (fairy flags) champignons of red and grey, and even green rings where they had danced the new moon before. But to be sure, I saw no fairies or elves or nains or even lutins, only their evidence. I knew that they were there, though, because after my journey to the l'anse, at dusk I could see the thin plumes of smoke rising like grey threads above the treeline; at night, the candle-flicker of their fires in the wood. Sometimes, I could hear the Indian drums and knew they danced to them in fairy rung:

In the spring, we went onto the ancient Bayou Bourbeau that borders the enchanted prairie. Up to the Grand Chemin halfway to Opelousas we went to put the canoes in the bayou. We came all the way down, behind the Academy of the Sacred Heart, we rested at the old wooden bridge covered in white blackberry flowers, and stopped to pick a few of the early dewberries.  Down the Bourbeau's green banks at narrow spots there were so many adolescent black moccasins, that they struck at the paddles and at the boat from the water and banks alike, until we made a game of bopping their hissing heads with our paddles. We floated along under a stripped umbrella and found white spider lilies and picked one for the mast of the ship. Further down where the brown water widened, there were white mulberry trees lining both banks of the muddy Bourbeau, and we picked and shook the trees until the berries fell like fat pink and white drops of rain.

 

Then one day in a rush I chanced upon a curious fellow, a centaur on the Prairie des Femmes road! He was all in brown and bareback'd with no identifying qualities that would place him in this century or the last. I had to stop to speak to him, to make sure he was not an apparition (as they are as likely on the Prairie des Femmes road as a centaur)  and though I spoke, he gave a sheepish smile but never replied except for a neighing sigh I heard as I turned. As he rounded the third curve, I snapped this photograph, and surely if I had not, you would believe my story or that the Prairie des Femmes was truly enchanted and maybe neither would I.

But then on the morning of the winter solstice, I received the biggest conformation of all! I happened to pass the Queen of the Prairie des Femmes in her grand Chariot en Paille, led by her entourage of black curs. She was wearing her magenta mantle, trimmed in brown furs! She did not stop, but gave me a gentle nod, for she was working to move the hay, for queens of this prairie must tend the herds, even on the darkest day!