Medicine I made since the early spring
Vinéraire oil and balm
Wild orange flower enfleurage oil
Sweet olive flower enfleurage oil
Poke root oil
Pine sap balm and oil
Cleaver infusion
Lizard's tail infusion
Chickweed oil
Plantain oil
Nettle tea
Nettle powder
Violet hydrosol
Violet tea
Clove, nettle and poke hair tonic
Clove spray for face
Cinnamon Florida water
Wax Myrtle infused alcohol
Pock Pock Talk with K4 and 2eme
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
April 11-
Heard the first song
Of the painted bunting
In the prairie today
April to August they sing
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.
Je refuse de couper les zabs
Ca fait plus possible à voir
Mon spring desire path
Light Acadiana
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."Half a bird egg shell in the garden
A pine knot, a berl
3 droplets of clear sap
Swamp rose petals and mamou flower in my apron pocket
2nd grade girls on the chapel steps in their white first communion dresses and veils
Gouter at 2:45- chocolate chip cookies
In 2012 there was a persistent maple syrup smell that hung in the back of my pasture. Having had enough familiarity with the other medicines, remedies and prairie plants, I began to scrutinize the individual plants in the back corner, and it was easy to find the one because I knew the others. I often identify familiar plants for my own needs through crushing the leaves and smelling them. If you know a plant well and work with it, this method is reliable. This plant's smell was unique. After some identification (it was pseudoghaphalium obtusifolium, fragrant rabbit tobacco, life everlasting, vinéraire), I let the season pass. Each time I returned to the back pasture it was no longer in that spot.
I still looked occasionally and asked around about a plant with this maple smell, but I lost it. Eventually I arrived at a time when I had a mental critical mass of native plant experience through my transcriptions of my hometown's Creole folklore. Sometimes I would set an intention to find a plant like herbe à vers, or wormseed (to make the traditional de-worming praline) or herbe à malo, aka lizard's tail (to make the teething necklace) and go out and find them somewhere in the prairie or swamp. It was in this way that in the summer of 2023 I finally found three vinéraire plants again in the side pasture. I cleared the other plants from around her and allowed her to grow. I also began to carry a spring with me everywhere I went. It was a sad time and I sat with the plant often and began to use it medicinally and spiritually. I never left home without it and it was with me through some tough times and gave me comfort for its smell, softness and as I began to learn, local rarity.
In this time I had a meeting with some folklorists and horticulturalists who I shared my curiosity with. They knew what it was but were incredulous that I had found it with my nose in the pasture. They eventually produced letters and contacts of local healers and Indigenous women who were 40 years in search of the plant, because it was now hard to find down the bayou.
I learned that it's a mid succession species that comes when the prairie is healing and becoming more diverse, but that it usually grows in undisturbed prairies, which my field is not; it was farmed for decades. Still remnants might remain at the edges, and memory remains in the land always.
Over the last three years I have observed this plant at all stages and seasons, through snow and drought. It likes liminal edge and dry soil. This could be one of the reasons that it appeared here, among others. It has spread voluntarily across my back pasture from three to around 700 (this year, so far) individual plants. It has spread on its own, under conditions that I monitor, and does not yet she grow where I plant her.
I make sprays, balms and burn it regularly as one would burn sage. I have documented its native uses, etymologies in Creole, French and Choctaw, as well as its extensive spiritual connections. I have shared in ongoing art exhibits such as Botanica at the Louisiana State Museum at the Cabildo in New Orleans as well as the Prairie Stories exhibit Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette, Louisiana. I have given lectures about it for several college classes in Louisiana and out of state, as well as at Basin Arts, Academy of the Sacred Heart, Nunu's, Atelier de Nature and at a workshop at Balfa Week.
I have had the most satisfying honor of providing the plant and seed to the women and men who were in search of it, as well as herbalists, traiteurs, healers, and a few of the members of the Indigenous tribes in order to return its medicine to the people of south Louisiana.
There was a white pine that volunteered in the western yard. It obstructed my view of the open prairie to the southwest, so my husband chopped the top for my photography. That cleared the view for a few years but that tree continued to grow. Except now, at the injury, it weeps sap. I’m not sure if it’s a memory of the damage that was done to clear the path, or if sickness or parasite still lives in the tree. No matter, it has become a medicine tree. On walks around the property I stop there and check the ground for chunks. I follow their fall patterns and gather them. At first I kept this sap and chunks of resin in my journals, not knowing what to do with it except smell it and let it perfume my journal.
One wet Louisiana winter day I went out to build a little fire in the wax myrtle bower but everything was damp. I pulled out the blank pages of my journal with the resin on them and they worked fine, similarly to the bois gras the men collected and used for fire starter. It kept my little fire going and kept me warm that day and others. It became a habit of mine to be able to spot injuries on resin trees and check them no matter where I was. I kept the pieces of resin in a tin can painted with blue and gold stars on the porch. But one day an indigenous friend gave me a balm made of bear grease and five kinds of fir resins from the north, saying that it would heal any wound and not even leave a scar. Sometimes I put the clearest sap on small cuts around my cuticle. Then I knew then what to do with my resin collection.
I melted the chunks down with sweet almond oil and when they were incorporated I filtered it and mixed it with melted bay wax from the bower to make a balm that my boys called “tree medicine”. They refused Neosporin but would accept the tree medicine on their wounds, only after I showed them the tree itself.
Daily I work atop the Grand Coteau at a school over 200 years old, full of old oak and pine alleys. Some of the pines seem to be nearly as old as the school and bare many scars and knots that give sap. I immediately began to survey each tree at recess and the girls would ask, "Madame, what are you doing?" Last year, one of the largest pines was struck by lightning and it created a rip in the bark that began to weep sap. Daily the girls and I go out and check this tree, because it gives the clearest sap that looks like tears. I have taught the girls that only the wounded trees will give the medicine, and in their healing, we can also share in it a little. I explained that the sap is like the tree’s blood and the resin is the scab. They apply it, like me, to their cuts, and know that hand sanitizer will clean it and cut the stickiness. I make a spray with the resin also that I use daily as a hand cleaner. Sometimes I come to my classroom and there are curious pine sticks on my desk that upon further inspection are tipped with sap. They'll make a resin platter out of a piece of bark, or dig into a knot with sticks often creating more injury and then more sap. One time I found a half pound chunk of resin, who knows how old, on my desk and thought it was a chunk of tasso. This morning as I was out there in my petticoats and cape gathering fresh pine sap tears with a ruler, and curious as it is, none of the girls even asked me what I was doing.
Lafayette Louisiana's group Da Entourage (The Entourage, also in Creole: the wall) came out with the regional hit The Bunnyhop in the 1990s. Da Entourage was formed by cousins Toemas (Griffin) and Alley Cat (Zeno), and their childhood friend Bunny B. (Brown).
When I hear this song I can't help but notice the hyper-local French Creole feel of the use of the name Josephine in the lyrics:
I'm so glad I got my own/I ain't worried bout Josephine
My life's a natural high/C'mon and bunny hop with me.
Martiniquaise Josephine Bonaparte, married to Emperor Napoleon, is perhaps the most famous owner of the name in the French Creole world, but as a Louisiana Cajun/Creole musician and writer, I can't help but feel the idea of this woman Josephine has trickled down from the echos of our popular music's past and into the Lafayette hip-hop scene. Something about the lyric "Josephine c'est pas ma femme" is giving the same energy as "I ain't worried 'bout Josephine."
Here I'll list as many songs as I can that mention Josephine in Cajun or Creole music.
La Valse de Josephine by Leo Soileau and Sadie Courville
Malheureuse, mais 'garde la bas la 'tite poussière, chère, de ti neg qui s'en vient, ti-galop chez Josephine.
Unhappy woman, look over there the little dust, dear, of your man who's coming at a cantor from Josephine's house.
My Josephine Hackberry Ramblers
Josephine oh my Josephine, t'es une jolie 'tite fille/Josephine, ma Josephine tu connais tu me fais m'ennuyer/ Tu m'as dit qu tu m'aimais/ Mais moi j'connais ça c'est pas vrai. Ma Josephine.
Josephine, oh my Josephine, you are a pretty little girl/ Josephine my Josephine you know you make me lonely/ You told me that you loved me/ But I know that's not true/ My Josephine
Josephine c'est pas ma femme by Clifton Chenier (Queen Ida/Fatz Domino)
Bon Dieu connait/Josephine c'est pas ma femme. O Nonc Helaire/ Josephine c'est pas ma femme.
The Good Lord knows, Josephine's not my wife. Oh Uncle Helaire/ Josephine's not my wife.
Hello Josephine Keith Frank
Hello Josephine/ well how do you do/ do you remember me my baby?? Like I remember you/ You used to drive your car/ through the drive-in window.
Joan of Arc week with the girls of the Sacred Heart 
