Categories: uncategorized
Date: 17 August 2004 22:14:49
I grew up in a dinky little town between two growing but still not-very-large towns, 45 miles southwest of New Orleans. The "highway", if you want to call it that, was the road running along Bayou Terrebonne. Back then, the far side was a whisper of a road, paved with white clamshell sometimes. The high side, or "the pave", our side, was mostly the side wealthier folk lived on, historically speaking. We were far from wealthy! But, well, as is the case many places, there were benefits we fell into, like that paved cracked little two-lane country road between sleepy little towns, because we were Caucasian. Most of the other side of the bayou in our area was cane field, or tidy little all-Black neighborhoods. Thus the many years before the other side was paved.
Now, with both sides of the bayou being considered major thoroughfares, all is paved and up-to-date. Heck, there's even a new stoplight, in use for perhaps two weeks, a block up the bayou from my old front yard. That is a real Twilight Zone feeling, trundling along that stretch of road through that still-quiet little community, and having to actually stop for a traffic light! Makes for a real moment of cognitive dissonance.
I doubt the property our little rented home stood on was even an acre, but I was a little bitty girl, so of course the house and yard felt huge. There was certainly an adventure, a new critter, some interesting thing, hiding behind every shrub, you know? A thorny wild Louisiana orange tree, a stubborn gardenia, dozens and dozens of Narcissi in the late Winter around the feet of the Bridal Veil bushes. Pink roses under my bedroom window, pretty but soft-scented, and huge creamy white roses by Sister's tree out back, roses the size of cabbages with a heady golden sweet scent.
I thought the buzzards who showed up atop the telephone poles one day were a thrilling sight. I took a picture, even. There were barely any around then, but they've made quite a comeback in the past 20 years. Must have something to do with the ban on DDT, back when I was a girl. Which is a good thing. They see that the road kill doesn't go to waste, heh. And they give visitors, like one contract welder from Britain, cause to drive into work wild-eyed about the "bloody vultures in the middle of the road!"
Our little wooden house was raised up on concrete pilings, as all older homes and many new still are, here. Lots of water in South Louisiana, whether you want it or not, where you want it and not. The clamshell driveway out to the main road was only a few yards long, but it seemed a mile to a little pre-school girl.
There were three huge cedar trees along the drive -- I remember being settled on a blanket under the cedars to shell butterbeans one year. Didn't care for being made to work, nooooo! Of course now, I think it's a pretty neat thing, to sit comfortably under a shade tree and process food I grew or caught myself.
They weren't comfy climbing trees, those cedars; none of them were really built for it. Even if they had been, they were evergreens, after all. The bark and any broken leaves wept clear, strong-smelling, resinous sap. Like see-through tar it was. Try getting that out a a little girl's hair, ha! My poor mother.
But, anyway, after I was a little older, and able to climb a tree while yet avoiding gummy spots, I enjoyed it. The scent was unbelievable. The texture of the lacy "needles" ... soft, far from needle-like ... the "fruit", if that's what they were, pretty slate-blue berry-looking swellings on the needle-leaves ... the soft, shredded-on-the-tree bark ... I really liked those trees.
One of the pangs I felt in the years after we moved away was seeing those cedars sacrificed to the new homeowner's desire for a concrete driveway. I loved the white clamshell drive and the little ditch on either side, meant for drainage but resulting in after-rain puddles almost as interesting as tide pools. He wanted modern and smooth more than tadpoles and living mud.
The one good climbing tree was a Chinese Tallow out back, one of a pair. The harder-to-climb one I had "given" to my little sister, generous me. Those were gnarly-barked, and had the only real riotous color around at the Fall leaf-turn, scarlet and burgundy and lemon and goldenrod and grasshopper/willow green and burnt orange and tangerine and so on. On a damp day -- as most are here! -- the bark would be black in the crevices, with silver-grey laced over it. The leaves would do their thing in the Fall, and as they fell you'd see more and more the little silver-white-pearl seeds clinging to the tips of branches.
In the Spring, all the leaves were a uniform bright green, with that pretty bark peeping out occasionally. The flowers smelled of honey, long fuzzy-looking green flowers like a small fox's tail the length of your hand. The honeybees loved them, and their were always plenty of those, since a smalltime rancher two houses up the bayou kept beehives among the shade trees -- mostly Tallows -- in his fields of Hereford crosses. I could climb "my" tree and be invisible to whoever stood at the back door, calling for me.
I thought about all that, the Cedars and the Tallows and the beautiful scents, because I passed the old home place several times today running errands. I stopped at Bourgeois Meat Market -- one of those old historical spots, in the same family for generations -- for some boudin. I remember stopping there with my parents as a small child, shuffling through the sawdust on the floor, as all butcher shops had back then.
The lot next door, usually an overgown mini-jungle, has been cleared. The vines and saplings and such were gone, and I saw they'd trimmed and stacked about six cedar trees. They were just grinding away the stump when I left the Market. What a Heavenly scent! And I'm so glad they sold those trees. They have a use in the world. If the use of the property -- a little lot between the road and the bayou, barely a mile upstream from my old home -- if its use demands the trees be removed, I am so glad someone will get some use and some joy out of the trees. A cedar-lined closet, a cedar-lined hope chest, maybe cedar chips to keep Mama happy with the scentlessness of a kid's gerbil.
I sure hope the three giants that stood guard out front throughout my childhood made other people happy after they were cut down. I miss them less if I think of the useful end they (hopefully) met.