Squirrel day Style Boards

 

Prairie Des Femmes Fall

La Saison des Zekes is Coming

La grande fête de la Paroisse Evangeline

La fête des écureuils!

La saison des écureuils

Va commencer officialment demain matin.

À tous ce vous les chasseurs

Qu'après nous écouter

On veut souhaite vous-autres va se comporter

a'oir un bon temps

et rappellez-vous de 

Les fusils et des armes

C'est pas des bébelles. 

The big holiday of Evangeline Parish

Squirrel Day!

Squirrel Season will officially begin 

tomorrow morning.

To all of you hunters who are listening

We hope that you will behave 

and have a good time and remember

rifles and guns

Are not play things.

Squirrel Season Warning: C'est Pas Des Bébelles

La grande fête de la Paroisse Evangeline
La fête des écureuils!
La saison des écureuils
Va commencer officialment demain matin.

À tous ce vous les chasseurs
Qu'après nous écouter
On veut souhaite vous-autres va se comporter
a'oir un bon temps
et rappellez-vous de 

Les fusils et des armes
C'est pas des bébelles.
C'est pas des bébelles. 
Les fusils et des armes
C'est pas des bébelles.
C'est pas des bébelles.
Les fusils et des armes
C'est pas des bébelles.
C'est pas des bébelles.
C'est pas des bébelles.

It's Okay We're Country

Usually when I see an amazing car decal, it's a guy's truck. Not so here! The girl who owns this truck was on break behind a restaurant on Main Street in Ville Platte. She showed me the fresh squirrel tail tied to her antenna, from her very first squirrel kill, she said. She then directed me to the back glass, which she said she designed and drew herself. I don't know who she was, but she just might be the coolest gal in Evangeline Parish.

Let it Slide, Love Country Life, Erin Loves Yoon:)

The things that are important to an Evangeline Parish Country Girl

Gearing up for Squirrel Weekend on the Platin

Here are some clips from the Platin social media about the coming of Squirrel weekend. Merci beaucoup to PDF contributor Monsieur Al.

The People of Evangeline Speak Part Deux 2013 Edition

Here, I collect the status updates and other information shared by South Louisiana people on squirrel day. Click here to see last year's edition. Click here to read about squirrel day.

 

 No, Mama, you can not suck the squirrel heads anymore!

My girls still think its disgusting that I eat squirrel brain. It's sweet like candy.

Why are there walnuts in the squirrel gravy?

Don't shoot dem damn squirrels in da head! -Leonard Guillory

Jealous of everyone heading off to the woods........try to leave some in the trees 

I Would Say its a good week! Became Godparents Yesterday and today I Officially own my Property! now just to kill a few squirrels

The weekend of the squirrel! All of Ville Platte will be a ghost town and the woods filled with happy hunters, cold beer, whiskey drinks, camp fires, great smelling food and good times!! Haha. 

Happy "Squirrel Weekend" everyone!

Squirrel dayyyyyyyyy!

Happy Squirrel Day!

Happy Squirrel Day! Although I am not in the woods back home in Louisiana, I'll celebrate with a nice highball in a red solo cup!

Happy Squirrel day Ville Plattians!

Happy Squirrel Day... Father and son off to the woods :)

Today would be one day that I would live to be back in Ville Platte. So Sad that no one else participates in Squirrel Day!

Happy Squirrel Day to my friends back home! Ladies, make me proud and shop till you drop :)

Men head to the woods and women head to the stores. Ville Platte seems to close its doors to the rest of the world.....SQUIRRELWEEKEND

While the boys are away, the girls will........SPEND MONEY!!!! Happy Squirrel Day Ladies!

I keep thinking about the Miss Alice's squirrel sauce piquante and how the b.b.'s would go ting ting ting on the plate when you spit them out... 

Speaking of Squirrel Day, my friend Emily Porche' sang last night on Jimmy Fallon about "eatin' squirrel brains" ... Great way to start off squirrel weekend!

 

“Your song tonight is a love ballad, very emotional song, it’s called ‘Eatin’ Squirrel Brains’" Fallon tells the first contestant. 

STOP! Squirrel Time.

Beech Nut Still In His Mouth: An Evangeline Parish Ex-Pat Remembers Squirrel Day of His Youth

 

From my younger years in the 70’s, I remember with distinct clarity, the palpable excitement in the air as the opening day of Louisiana squirrel season approached. Long before Facebook and Twitter, or Budget day, men and boys at schools, stores, and bars, busily chatted of special spots, careful not to reveal exact locations, but trying to figure out locations others were speaking of.  As the season neared, we spent hours in the woods looking for cuttings, where squirrels were feeding, “calling” spots, which gave unofficial stake to a found bevy of squirrel activity. More hours putting thought into, and discussing the “best” hunting clothes and shells, and packing them.

The day before the season opened, the loaded pickups and campers headed to the woods. Supper eaten around the fire, men drinking beer and whiskey, boys overdosing on pop and messing with the fire, anxiously asking each other, “so where’re you going tomorrow?” It was hard to sleep that night, thinking about the next morning, and through the tipsy men’s snoring.
The next morning came with a wave of excitement, not even overtaken by presents under the tree at Christmas. Men chuckled at the boys, who were afraid to get out too late and miss the first movement, and gave them last minute advice. “Move your eyes, not your head, even if a mosquito bites you”. “Listen for the whoosh of the branch that a squirrel jumped on, or the scrape of claws on bark”. “Don’t get impatient and move too soon.”
I remember feeling hurried during the trek through the woods by flashlight, to the prescouted spot of known squirrel activity. “What if it gets light earlier today”. I remember feeling even more hurried as I tried in the dark to pick a sitting spot with the best view of the cutting tree, sometimes sitting at several spots. The whole affair climaxed as first light began to filter through the trees, and tension built as the time neared for gray squirrels to begin moving. I remember being a bit mad when I heard shots before I saw something, worried someone was getting ahead of me, and maybe I picked the wrong spot. Then….that telltale whoosh of a branch with the jumping weight of a squirrel in the still air. My heart would race so much I had to fumble for the safety of my shot gun.
There he is, looking like a thin string flying along the branches in the dim light! Gun comes to shoulder, but he’s gone, bitter disappointment and trembling hands, the gun comes down. There he is again! Gun comes up, but he’s running and zig zagging too fast to find at the end of the barrel. Then gone again. Man, I’ll never kill one today. Then, there he is, shaking the end of the big beech tree I found the cuttings under. A trembling aim, and BOOM! And…..nothing. Oh, man…how did I miss. I won’t cry, but I sure want to. Then, thump, thump, POOF!, The squirrel finally falls, hitting branches on the way down to that satisfying thump on the ground.
I should wait to see if there’s more, but I can’t help but run over to where I think he fell. There he is, with pretty soft fur, beech nut still in his mouth. I pick him up and admire him for a few minutes, noticing all the little ticks on him, before sliding him in my bag. The shooting of other hunters reminds me I need to get going if we’re gonna be eating brown gravy tonight, so I move off, constantly feeling behind me to make sure he’s still in the bag.
Getting back to camp after the squirrels quit moving, we each felt the need to discuss, in complete detail the full sequence of events that lead up to each squirrel seen, complete with dramatizations. Then, that night, there was somewhat of a blissful feeling, eating squirrel and brown gravy, cooked by master chefs. I remember feeling sorry for the women folk who had nothing better to do than go shopping.


Bryan LaFleur, grew up in L'anse Grise, a suburb of Mamou, La. He joined the Marine Corps right after high school, which had a huge and long lasting impact on him. After enlistment, he ended up in NE Texas, though he is not sure how. He has reconnected with his Cajun cultural roots in SW Louisiana through the language and music with the help of his parents and friends. Bryan is an artist who makes incredibly beautiful Cajun Accordions (check out L'Anse Grise Accordions) and is also fluent in Franglais, Cajun French and Korean. Who knew?! Bryan is a fireman in the Dallas metroplex, and, he says, is lovin' it. (via Facebook)

The author with some another catchs, in Lanse Grise 1980 (via B. Lafleur, Facebook)

How, Even as an Americaine, I learned Louisiana French Part 1

I remember singing "Frère Jacques" with my aunt in the bathroom of my grandmother's house on Park Boulevard in Baton Rouge when I was four. There is a tape of my parents playing with me when I was almost two where mom calls dad a gros tub and I repeat it, and he howls with laughter. Mom was constantly doing things like making us pat-pat-zoo (pain perdu) and cleaning the gra-doo (gras-doux) off of my toddler face. Dad was always repeating these words and laughing. I guess I was aware of the French because of his perspective. He was a Baton Rouge Creole, a musician, with that "dark French" skin. His family, despite having ample French, Spanish and Acadian heritage, had been Americanized a couple generations back in Baton Rouge, though his grandmother spoke some French for sure. That is where the Frere Jacques came in. Dad was charmed with the cute "coonass" things my mother, the youngest daughter of a Ville Platte merchant said. One of the first stories he told me about their courtship (besides them meeting at the Evangeline Club when she was 15, he was playing in the band Clutch) was about the time she asked him, upon arriving somewhere, if he was going to "get down" out of the car. He thought she meant "getting down" in the 1970's sense of the word. She just meant get out of the car.  She did not realize that, like so many other things she said, getting down from the car, saving the dishes, getting "to da terre" was not standard, and on the other side of the Atchafayala Basin, they talked differently. Now I know that the way we use "get down" comes from French. When stepping down from a car or carriage, the verb "descendre- to get down, descend" is used. We learned English from people whose first language was French, and so we speak French in English.

Dad always used the words he heard the Ville Plattians use in his songs. One song, "Frenchy Town" went: 

"Got drunk at the bar, 

ti pas honte, 

ti pas honte, 

threw a big tracas, 

no mo drinks for me..." 

Another one about him leaving for tour went: 

"I had to phone ya from Livonia 

It's me, T-Neg.

I'm on my way to California

Heart all broke like a paques-paques egg."

When dad entered the contest for the 1984 New Orleans World's Fair theme song, he went up against giants like Toussaint and Neville, and won first and second places with the two songs he wrote and recorded entirely himself in the studio at our house. He incorporated Louisiana French lyrics at the end of the winning song, Mardi Gras City, saying "'Eh là bas, allons..."

When my parents divorced I was in first grade. I moved to Ville Platte where my grandparents and extended family lived. There my first real immersion began. I picked up on how people talked differently from Baton Rouge. The week we moved I told my mother, Mom, I love Ville Platte, It's a lot like Baton Rouge, except in Baton Rouge they say "Main Street" and in Ville Platte they say "Main Street". That is, I was picking up on the way Cajun French and Cajun English emphasize the last syllable of a word or phrase. 

In Ville Platte, French was commonplace, but because it was never spoken to children of my generation, at least not in my family, as a young child I heard it, and also tuned it out to a point. I remember hearing it the most in Pointe Blue, at my best friend's house. Her grandmother Soileau lived down the road from her, and was a real French creole woman. She and her son, my friend's father, would sit in their cowhide rockers in front of the fireplace in her country kitchen. They'd rock on the linoleom floor behind us and chicane back and forth in French while we ate squirrel rice and gravy, spitting the bbs out until they went ting ting ting on the plate. We couldn't drink our pop while we ate, no. Had to eat, then drink. We got a check cola on ice from under the sink. Before dinner, we washed our hands in the corner of the kitchen in an old time bassin with a pitcher to pour fresh water. The water in the bassin stayed cloudy with soap. When we were bored, we chased the sheep in the back yard of her house or went to explore the ancient sharecropper barn. Sometimes, my friend's dad would leave to run his traps, and come home having caught something mysterious, like a pure black coyote.

One day, I asked Mr. Soileau about what they were saying, what language was it? He said it was French and asked me if I wanted to learn. I did. He was eating a banana. He showed it to me. "Banane" he said. I repeated. That's easy, I thought. If that's French, I can do that. I kept that word "banane" in my head like a treasure, my first real French word. Old Mrs. Soileau gave us Moon Pies and pop rouge for a snack when I'd spend the weekend there. She'd always say, "Aw, Cher, you so fat!" to me. My friend's parents assured me that it was a compliment, and I struggled to understand, but after so many times of her telling me, I did start to understand. I loved her ways. I loved her cooking and her button collection and her kind eyes. Surely, though, to her, I was a 'tite Americaine. I had an Americain last name, I was the granddaughter of the owner of the only department store in the parish who spoke French for business only. And I was fat. Americaine.

In fifth grade, I moved schools and went to Vidrine Elementary. In the mornings I'd ride with Ms. Dolly Fontenot and her son, and she'd listen to KVPI, the town radio station. We'd listen to the news in French and to the radio program called the Tasse de Cafe, all very lively and almost all in Louisiana French. The whole drive through the misty cow fields of the Vidrine Road, I would listen, and pretend that I, too understood. I did understand when they were advertising a buisness and giving the telephone number because they'd say, "trois-six-trois" (363) which was the prefix that all the phone numbers in Ville Platte began with. So I must have known my numbers. Then, low and behold, the next year, on the Sacred Heart playground, a little Buller girl taught me how to say "fee bee tan" (fils de putain) or SOB, in French. Americaine or not, I was learning.