La Serpente

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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 

The Dome of the Prairie

The prairie has a memory and it echos like a dome. I first felt it when I was alone out here at night, in a pull camper, waiting. I'd sit at the table, the light from the sliding glass door created a halo of illumination that terminated at the long grass, where I perceived its rustling as large animals passing in the darkness. 

The pre-Katrina nights out here I was afraid of the wilderness of this place. It was the camp. I was never sure how near or far I was from civilization. I stayed quietly in the camper, barely wanting to alert the prairie of my presence. But the Tuesday New Orleans flooded, like so many others, I fled north and took refuge in the prairie like no other place before. The long gravel road was my moat, the orb of light in the field around the camper became my world, the safest place in south Louisiana. 

We planted the prairie edge with a ring of thousands of native trees: sweet gum, live oak, cypress, persimmon, pecan, mulberry etc., keeping the center pasture open in different rotations. The trees created a little wood where we maintained a path, and formed a semi-circle around the perimeter of the property. The higher the edge trees grew, the more my prairie view was obstructed, but also the more the birdsong echoed within the dome of the prairie. I sat at the base of the cypress tree and imagined the life I would lead here. Somewhere, floating in the air above the prairie ground were the rooms of a castle-home not yet built, where I would live blissfully, conceive and become a mother, raise my children, where I would birth this very blog and all of the notions in it, where I would deny myself the world for the protection of the prairie.

I became one with this place, instinctually returning all fertility to her ground. It's here where my children's nombrils are buried, under a live oak in the western yard. I ate the flowers and fruits and roots produced here. I gathered and made medicines daily. I made perfume oils and sprays of the prairie flowers and balms with the pine sap. I caught rainwater and collected dew on resonant days. In the late afternoons in fall, I could hear a faint rumble, like thunder, of the Beau Chene drum line echoing in the dome. The prairie remembered drums.

I settled into the natural law of this land. We grew and lost both plants and animals without getting too sentimental.  We allowed nature to rule, even a little wildly. Out of this natural kingdom many realms were born in me. We planted gardens but I never had a green thumb. It was the native plants that resonated because they were not reliant on me, except for my understanding of them and their environment and my dedication to their growth and protection. As time when on plants like honeysuckle, chassepareille, elderflower and blackberry crowded themselves through every crack of the fence, waving wildly to be noticed, to be made of use, and I listened. 

There was an unassuming charm here at prairie, an enchanted, forgotten country east of Opelousas.  It was in the juxtaposition of her beauty and humility, of how she is treated now, and the dignity in the story of who she was before. She remembered the millennia of seasons, and despite the modern agriculture, the cutting and poisoning and the forgetting of the old ways and the old languages, the plants remembered the cycles and seeds still remained in the ground who, despite the loss of so much rhizome, also remembered how to grow, especially after a prairie burn. 

There was information in the silence and the space that I lived in, the movements of the plants and animals, the sunrises and sunsets, the position the moon rose at different phases adn in relation to the cypress tree.  Sometimes when the prairie sky domed around the edge trees I could feel the different birdsongs that echoed within this protectorate. Slowly I learned that language, too.  

My red ballet flats with prairie dirt in the camper, 2004

Decorations of dog fennel and a bottle of red liquid we found in the house, room party 2004

Me and Paul in the orb, 2005

The camper and the room, summer 2005

the pull camper 

Indian Perfume

​A swamp rose out the darkness 

Coton jaune from the loom

Sillage on my homespun  

Of Indian perfume 

The marsh was wide at midnight 

A braid of long black hair

The feather of a water bird 

 The sacred vinéraire 

I gathered my best medicine: 

Dew from the swamp rose bloom 

The highway cut straight through the marsh 

Love is like a wound 

I gave him my best medicine 

Under the flower moon 

A bouquet of everlasting 

He called Indian perfume 

Medicines I made in early May

First thing I did this morning was to collect the rain drops off of the gardenias, making a gardenia water that smells like perfume. 

Cherry bounce with wild fruit gathered in St. Landry Parish Louisiana

Perfume sprays: bee balm, baume et vinéraire, life everlasting

Dried baume in my journal

Cinnamon and clove alcohol

Lavender oil alcohol

Gardenia enfleurage oil from the gardens 

Lightening pine sap 

Clearest swamp rose hydrosol before I left for New Orleans

Things I found in the prairie after the rain

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Various white and black glazed ceramic

 Knapped blue glass

Blue crawfish claw

Heavy polished black stone

First Cherries

I went and picked cherries on the tree line. I saw a mockingbird in the cherry tree and we exchanged some unpleasantries. There are three cherry trees in the Sacred Heart tree lines that I know, and they are growing among fragrant cherry laurels, chasseparaille, wild grape vines, pecans, hackberry, and elderflower bushes. Today there was a light drizzle paired with the smell of bonfire out on the blue coteau. There were nettles gone to seed underfoot with no sting. I picked cherries until it started to really rain. I stored them in an empty plastic apple I got for teacher appreciation. 

I gathered there, at home and also along the Bayou Fuselier Road. I reviewed the name of wild cherry in Choctaw italikchi, doctor tree. Tomorrow I plan on checking my other trees and researching the uses of the cherry leaves, bark and root after Marius' first communion. 

Lightening Pine

In the storms this afternoon lightening struck very close to the Sacred Heart. I was standing in the first grade classroom admiring their fairyland village of cascading vines and paper mâché houses when the bright lightening flashed through the windows along the gallery and thunder boomed, shaking the coteau under our feet. We screamed and huddled together; it was so close! I started singing Oh les trains quand ils jubutaient by Cesar Vincent to the girls. 

I wondered if it was at my lightening pine again, the tallest and biggest in the pine alley, less than a hundred feet from our 204 year old school building. I check it almost daily since it was struck last year. The injury left is a long open vein in the bark that exposes the weeping sapwood. It produces the clearest tears of sap, like amber pearls at the seam. I've spent the last year collecting the clear suspended drops from this injury in miniature jars. I remember being so interested when it was struck because I knew it would open a wound that would give. I felt that the sap was now charged with a clear electricity.  Since then we have observed the tree healing itself again. The bark can be read. There is an identical scar around the other side that is sealed up with decades of bulbous resin that sometimes form balls that fall at the base. I collect them as curiosities for our knick-knack shelf in class. I found one today. I have taught my girls about tree medicine.

In the light rain after the storm I wandered out onto the wet grounds to check the great pine and found it had again acted as sentinel, channeling the electricity through the sap and down into the holy coteau, a lightening rod protecting the entire campus. 

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

Je suis la Prairie des Femmes

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La pluie tombe sur ma reineaume 

Mes larmes font une prairie tremblante 

La terre ondule en bas de mes pieds 

Je suis la Prairie des Femmes 

Pointe Blue Toile

Cypress washhouse

Sprouts from the spearmint patch

Sharecropper barn with license plates attached

Manche des Prudhomme blue hatchback

Wild onions and the red sassafras

Chicken trees, soco vines

Brick cistern, fig wine

A child's gumbo, balles de foin

Catalpa tree at the coin

Appalousa paint horse

Under the chinaball

Nonc grows the chat-bouillie and lilas parasol

Point Blue rice pump

Barbwire fence

Beyond the cove

The evergreen isle

Of far off Pointe Aux Pins

Song of the Painted Bunting

April 11- 

Heard the first song 

Of the painted bunting 

In the prairie today 

April to August they sing

Tu peux croire

Ever since I crossed the River 

I aint never been the same

Bathin' in the rice pump

Prayin' on a name

The mint around the wash house

Liane de Ba-Na-Kà

Tu peux croire comme tu veux!

C’est le Bon Dieu qui fait tout ça.

A Prairie des Femmes Desire Path

Printemps dans la prairie

Je refuse de couper les zabs

Ca fait plus possible à voir

Mon spring desire path

Dark Acadiana

Dark Acadiana

The night sky over Kaplan

Rodrigue's oaks

Maw-maw from Pointe Noire

Fleur d'Asiminer/Paw-Paw flower

La valse de Balfa

L'Anse de Prien Noir

Duck and andouille gumbo

Cucumbers with the black pepper and white vinegar

Gateau Sirop

The Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary

"Carry ya cross"

Malveaux

Jar of cherry bounce

A Sidney Brown Accordion 

Daily mass in Scott

Elton Rice Dryers

The Pine Grove Blues

Reciting the Divine Mercy 

Burning the cane field

Ville Platte Smoked Ponce

The Mamou Teenage Center

Chou gras

"Spidawort can grow unda the black walnut tree, yeah."

Un cafe noir

Blackbird Jambalaya

Sur le Bord de Vaisseau Blind Uncle Gaspard

"Don't dig in the dirt on Good Friday, the ground will bleed."

Rice Fields surrounding the Holiday Lounge

Water from Bayou Vermillion

Madame Grand Doigts

Making a holy hour in the avant-jour

Ash Wednesday

Zin-Zin Road

Les Mortalites on la Tasse de Cafe

Moise Robin's Golden Gate

Blood Boudin

Pray Opelousas

Planter dans la lune

X on your last name 

Light Acadiana

 Light Acadiana

Evangeline Maid Bread

Elder Flower Tops

Maw-Maw from LeBlanc

The Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary

Nannie's Tatting

White wisteria on Church Road

Cherokee Roses along the cattle fields

Lizard's Tail root in water

Chataignier Road after a spring rain

La Danseuse by Blind Uncle Gaspard

Ave Maria Shrine in Prairie Ronde

Rue des Etoiles

Feu-Follet

Daily mass in Vatican

Avery Island salt dome

Cattle egrets

Catalpa flowers

Creole Belle rice sacks 

Tea Cakes 

Mayhaw Sweet Dough Pie

Fish on Fridays

Blonde roux

Coffeemilk

Job's tear Rosary 

White painted gourd birdhouse

The Pine Island Apparition 

Alligator-gar scale earrings

Holy Water from the rice pump

Vineraire flowers at La Toussaint

The Imaculata Center

Avoyelles Parish

Easter Sunday in Abbeville

Magnalite pots

May crowning by the girls of the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Grand Coteau

A bowl of white medium grain rice

Équand Bocephus était au Purple Peacock. »

Le grand musicien et garçon de Hank Williams Sr. aussi connu comme Bocephus va être après jouer la musique au bal à Eunice!  Ouais mes amis, c’est Hank Williams Jr. qui va jouer au Purple Peacock a grand Eunice ce vendredi soir à sept heures du soir, Portes ouvertes à six heures! Comment tu crois, hein? Mais monde, il faut se fionner pour y aller! Etre faquin! Hot Dog! Bocephus au Purple Peacock.

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Cherry Bounce Update

 In 2013 I transcribed a recipe from La Tasse Cafe radio program about a curious drink called cherry bounce:

"Cherry Bounce is a thick sweet strong liqueur that people in south Louisiana make around the holidays.  You shake the wild cherry trees (merisiers) so that the berries, called merises or choke cherries, fall onto a sheet."

From that time on I began spotting wild cherry trees in our tree lines and around town or at the camp. This was my process with many plants. Every year we would check for the cherry trees and gather from the most reliable ones considering access, height, severity of bird strike, yearly production changes or other challenges. Over the years, my knowledge of where the best producing trees are has grown. This year I have become especially good at spotting the trees and the season is long and plentiful, possibly because of the snows. I have spent the entire month of May and half of June daily checking my cherry trees and it is a fulfilling activity for me. I go to my little tree, gather enough for the day, then gauge if I have enough for another fifth, and should I stop in at Russel's for it. As I pick along the Teche, I can hear the bells of the church ring on the half hour. It's just me and the birds. My cousin Paula told me that my great grandfather also made cherry bounce. I've been making it for about ten years and never knew that, but my yearly focus on this process feels like it must be hereditary.

I have a list that I wrote of where to find the cherry trees but I may have augmented it for my own bounce security. 

Les merisiers:

2 in the garden at the house with swamp rose, pomegranate, muscadine and grape vines

1 huge one on the northbound lane of Evangeline Thruway Lafayette 1 in the eastern tree line in the front (could not locate 2025) 1 Prairie Laurent Dolla Store (big daddy) 2 on the Bayou Teche, pas loin de l'église 4 au moins à l’Academie de Sacré Cœur tree line Grand Coteau

1 at the curve in the heart of Grand Coteau 3 at the highest point of Chemin de Bayou Fuselier 2 on the Main Drag à Carencro (did not access) 2 on I-49 at exit 11 near the cypress place (trop haut, trop traffic, et dans les herbes) 2 Chicot woods island à Nonc Den

Here is the recipe I transcribed from the Mercedes Vidrine cookbook via la Tasse de Café radio Program. 

I should note that I go heavy on the cherries, good on the sugar, and I do not do the aging process with just cherries and sugar. I prefer to wash and dry the cherries, admire them, fill a bottle up 1/3 with them, cover with 1/3 sugar and fill to the top with whisky. I let that age for a month or two, shaking every week and quality control testing every few days.

Maison Blanche

Maison Blanche

Moi je reste dans un mobile home
Mais tous les soirs je rêve de ma maison blanche
Moi j'ai une femme et un ti-garçon
Et j'aimerais les mettre dans ma maison blanche

Moi j'veux pas d'être president
Mais j'aimerais rester dans ma maison blanche.

Moi j'veux pas d'être le president
Mais j'aimerais rester dans ma maison blanche.

Ma Maison Blanche

 

Don't Bouder? A note on the boudin etymology

In recent years Billeaud’s Meat and Grocery has used an ingenious marketing tool: the power of bilingual community slang, to sell the rice and meat sausage we know as boudin. 

When I was little we bought boudin behind the counter of gas stations and meat markets. Seeing it prepared fresh at the boucherie was rare for me. Most people lost familiarity with the vocabulary that surrounds the making of it. With English rapidly replacing French (we already about lost gratons for cracklins!), we sometimes absorb only figurative meaning of words. For example I knew a gueppe was a mean woman, and it took me years to learn that it actually meant "wasp". In childhood “to pout” was known as “boo-day” (bouder - to make boudin). When I  pouted, my uncles would grab my protruding bottom lip and exclaim, “gimme dat boudin!!” I was insulted by their flagrant disregard of my emotional angst, invasion of personal space and bemused at how they savored the imaginary “boudin” they would thank me for making for them. 

Fast forward 30 years and all the kids like me who were mocked, boudin-bottom lips stolen,  can now reminisce on these memories when they see The Billeaud’s billboards and t-shirts that exclaim, “Don’t boo-day, eat boudin!”.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank business like Billeaud’s who advertise with our special brand of franglais. It’s heart warming and makes me want to buy their smoked meats. But if you will allow me,  may I remind the general public that although boudin does make us happy, that that if one does not “bouder” (literally: to make boudin) then there will be no boudin to be had. Then we’ll all be pouting!