On Familiar Terms

Can’t claim the title above as my own, but on this afternoon in early December the words seemed just right and a tiny borrowing is harmless enough. Among his many books, Donald Keene wrote in 1996 one called On Familiar Terms, a series of essays describing a few of the people and experiences of his time in Japan. Far from Japan and back again on home ground in Louisiana, everything is once more familiar and to large extent an overflow of sensory impressions. Sights and sounds, southern voices overheard, their rhythm and drawl calling up memories of remembered aunts and uncles playing cards at the kitchen table; conversation with friends so enduring that words take on a meaning enriched by time and place and the Christmas table holds promise of not sugar plums and a gingerbread house, but of crawfish pie, po-boys and oyster stew.

Hard to remember the last Christmas I passed in Baton Rouge, but something tells me it was before the invention of ballpoint pens and color television. One Louisiana Christmas that for no special reason sticks in memory calls up images of an ugly brown suit and too much bourbon-laced eggnog. And here I am back again for Christmas with the friend who stood beside me singing carols, had no ugly brown suit but loved the eggnog as much as I. Back for Christmas with the girl I dated but the one that eggnog-loving friend married. With or without the eggnog, Christmas or otherwise, a season with Raymond & Dee is living life grand.

On most mornings my feet find a path along stretches of Florida sand, but this morning it was a different walk along familiar streets with ribbon-wrapped trees and pudgy snowmen decorating the homes of Old Goodwood. The nine months since my last visit have brought some change to those streets and houses. Landscapers have reshaped yards and contractors have both spruced up and added on, but the splendor of huge old oak trees overhanging streets and drooping their branches low over sidewalks is unchanged. Reading David Mitchell’s book Black Swan Green the other day, these words jumped off the page: “Trees’re always a relief, after people.”

Hidden in Plain View

New Orleans is a fun place to spend a day, or two or three. Find a parking place to leave the car that’s either in, nearby or convenient to the French Quarter, tighten the laces on your walking shoes and strike out. In a matter of minutes you’ll find yourself moving among a throng of fascinating types, most in a friendly and gregarious frame of mind. It is the oldest part of the city and every street corner, every building whether freshly painted, hung in giant ferns, drab or reeking of history is worthy of a moment’s appraisal.

Some of us go for the bookstores, others for the antique shops, and probably a majority for the food and drink. Even the smallest of restaurants could turn out to be the hight point of a day, and the number of friendly watering holes is beyond counting.

For many, afternoon and early evening is a time for meeting friends, new or old at one of those friendly watering holes. If conditions are right you will find a comfortable spot at or around a table on the patio or sidewalk and in no time at all meet four or five people straight out of John Kennedy Toole’s picaresque novel of New Orleans life and dialect, A Confederacy of Dunces.

Whatever time you end up at Café du Monde for coffee and beignets—and everyone does at some juncture of the day—you’ll find a hundred or more crowded tables dusted in powdered sugar and watched over by more waiters than anyone would have thought possible. Those not patrolling sit lined in chairs waiting for a summons and counting their tips. Don’t be surprised if one of them is a long time finding your table hidden in plain view. For this day weary reveler the best time is late at night just before paying the ransom on the car and driving the seventy miles home.

Natural Teeth

Sitting around last night talking about some of the mischief we got into as teenagers, all agreed that authorities operated in those days with a degree of leniency unseen today. We got away with a lot, and on one or two rare occasions it was a type of “mischief” the law doesn’t overlook today. That shouldn’t be too surprising now, when population numbers are higher, traffic is heavier and accidents more frequent. Criminal behavior is also more common today, and with these developments, laws and the enforcement of them has become more rigid.

With that in mind, consider at the same time that Louisiana has some crazy state laws on the books. You have to wonder just how enthusiastic the authorities are about enforcing some of these laws. Here are a few examples from a list of unusual Louisiana laws—no kidding.

It is illegal to rob a bank and then shoot at the bank teller with a water pistol.

Biting someone with your natural teeth is simple assault, while biting someone with your false teeth is aggravated assault.

Prisoners who hurt themselves could serve an additional two years in jail.

No one may pour a drink out on the ground at any drive-in movie.

Mardi Gras beads may not be thrown from a third story window in New Orleans.

City Commission members may not drink during a public meeting or risk a $50 fine.

It is illegal to practice voodoo in the city limits.

In New Orleans snakes are not allowed within 200 yards of the Mardi Gras parade route.

Condoms may not be thrown from parade floats during Mardi Gras.

No one may throw a bottle of Coke at a Mardi Gras parade float, or any other passing float.

It is illegal to have sex with a cow.

It is illegal to be an alcoholic.

Saying obscene things on the telephone is illegal.

Not sure how long this law has been on the books, but certainly in today’s market Louisiana crawfish are a valuable commodity. Chances are good that like any other hot item, some people look for a shortcut…

Stealing crawfish carries a penalty of jail time with or without hard labor. Stealing more than $500 worth of crawfish carries a term of ten years in prison; theft of less than $500 worth of crawfish calls for two years, and any amount under $300 a six-month jail term. Hard labor is an optional punishment in each case.

Crawdads & Alligators

April is a time in Louisiana when the air is full of festival fun, when feet are itching to “cut da rug” at Zydeco hoedowns in Lafayette, milk wild cows at Angola or get together at crawfish boils in backyards everywhere. An old saying in south Louisiana goes, “A Cajun will eat anything that won’t eat him first.” Po-boys, fried catfish, alligator and crawfish pistolettes are around every corner and it’s all a part of what makes Louisiana cooking famous.

Crawfish are an inseparable part of Cajuns and the culture that grew up around those French Canadians who settled in southern Louisiana in the mid-1700s. These mud-burrowing crustaceans—alternately called crawdads, mudbugs or crayfish—are enjoyed roughly from March to November (they go dormant in winter) and taste something like a cross between shrimp and lobster. You’ll find them in a few dozen recipes, but the most popular way of eating Crawfish in Louisiana is boiled, straight out of the shell.

Crawfish can be bought pre-boiled and clean, but most prefer to do it themselves, soaking the crawfish in an ice chest full of fresh or salted water prior to cooking. This soaking both cleans their exterior and forces them to spit up the muck in their intestines. Ideas differ on how to season a crawfish boil, with an equal number of opinions as to which one is best, but a large pot of boiling water seasoned with salt, cayenne pepper, lemon, garlic, bay leaves and Cajun seasoning is a good start. Other additions include potatoes, corn on the cob, onions, garlic, sausage and sometimes mushrooms. The boiled shellfish are generally served at a gathering known as a crawfish boil. Other popular variations include crawfish étouffée, fried crawfish, crawfish pie, crawfish dressing, crawfish bread and crawfish beignets. Outside Louisiana, Sweden is the only place in the world where crawfish are widely consumed. Swedish crawfish boils are called Kräftor, ‘crawfish’ in Swedish.

The incredible crawfish étouffée

Eating boiled crawfish involves a tricky series of twists, cracks, and pinches that spill the red-brown juice over fingers and hands. Some eat only the tail, which is actually the crawfish’s abdomen, but most in Louisiana begin by breaking off the tail and sucking the head with its rich juice, which the locals call fat.

Crawfish Pistolette, a piece of heaven from the bayou

Fossils suggest that crawfish have been around for 285 million years. They are not usually rare in Louisiana, at least when there are no Katrinas or oil spills in the gulf. Most crawfish live short lives of less than two years, a brief life span that means quick, high-volume reproduction is important for continuation of the species. Because the eggs look something like berries, the egg-bearing females are described in May and June as being “in berry.” Eggs hatch in ten to twenty weeks and the newly-hatched crawfish stay attached to their mother until shortly after a second molting of the shell.

Louisiana supplies ninety-eight percent of the crawfish harvested in the United States. In 1987 the state produced ninety percent of the crawfish in the world, seventy percent of it consumed locally. In 2010, the Louisiana crawfish harvest was about 88 million pounds, almost all from aquaculture. Wild crawfish from the Atchafalaya Basin accounts for about twenty percent of Louisiana’s harvest, about 15.5 million pounds in 2010. From seventy to eighty percent of crawfish in Louisiana are red swamp crawfish, the remaining twenty or thirty percent white river crawfish. Despite the large-scale production in Louisiana, most frozen crawfish available in supermarkets outside of Louisiana are imported from China.

Before A. Hays Town

Prolific Louisiana architect A. Hays Town first brought the beauty of traditional Louisiana building to the attention of people far and wide of bayous and Acadian culture, and my own love of those traditional building styles began with his ‘replicated’ designs. Perhaps becoming so enamored of the famous architect’s designs blinds us to the fact that such building was going on long before Mr Town made it de rigueur. It was his eye that fully discerned the beauty of Louisiana’s old plantation houses, left in many cases to neglect and deterioration. His architectural masterpieces took old ideas and materials into a modern setting away from the bayous and sugarcane fields and made them sing as beautifully on city streets. But as much as I admire the work of Mr Town, the focus here is on a house standing long before his birth.

The March/April issue of the magazine Louisiana Life includes a story on one of the old Louisiana houses, this one—though moved eleven miles from its original site—is in a rural setting of seventy acres located along a channel of water in southern Louisiana. Owners of the house like to call this waterway a bayou, but it is more accurately a channel or chenal, remnant of a Mississippi River channel that once flowed through the area. But it’s best not to dicker over words, since the setting of Maison Chenal, whether bayou or channel is idyllic.

A cherished part of Louisiana’s architectural history, Maison Chenal is a raised eighteenth century Creole plantation home located along the Chenal waterway in Point Coupee Parish. The house was bought and moved eleven miles to its present site in 1973 and restored to museum perfection by its owners, Pat and Jack Holden. Unfortunately, complete documentation of the early history of the house does not exist, but evidence points to construction in the 1790s. The last documented owner was planter-merchant Julien Poydras in 1808, a gentleman well-known in New Orleans history.

The front garden of the house is surrounded by a pieu (post or pointed stake) fence made from split cypress boards.

The downstairs porch on the front of the house has a floor of old bricks common to these old homes and a frequent characteristic of Hays Town designs.

A bedroom opens onto the front gallery overlooking the garden.

Those wishing to read the complete article and view other photographs, click here.

Alligators & Oysters

Today’s post is the third and last on Chef John Folse’s definitive cookbook on the Cajun-Creole traditions of preparing fish and seafood, Hooks, Lies & Alibis.

Though raised in Louisiana, for me there is still an aura of the exotic in the recipes of John Folse and the people he works with in south Louisiana. His signature dishes, as well as those of other chefs in the area are brimming with the flavors of sac au lait, granulated garlic, artichoke hearts, mirlitons and Creole mustard, to name but a few example ingredients in the hundreds of recipes included in Hooks, Lies & Alibis. Not only are the recipes enticing, but everything about the collection of ingredients, the preparation and the land of south Louisiana is presented in page after page of high quality photographs compiled by photographers both local and from out of state. Pass over the history and recipes, the book still guarantees an hour or more of browsing through stunning photographs.

This last offering from the big fish cookbook includes two recipes chosen at random, recipes still untried in my kitchen, though I’m hoping that is a temporary condition. Pictures are included relating to the two recipes, but others have been added merely as a means of hinting at the book’s visual appeal.

OYSTERS BENSON

Comment: This recipe is from Rockefeller’s Restaurant in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, and is the creation of chefs Thomas Bond, Lester Nicosia and Chris Letard. This is an ideal brunch dish and is also great when served for breakfast.

Ingredients:

18 fresh-shucked oysters

3 English muffins, halved and toasted

vegetable oil for deep-frying

6 slices Canadian bacon

3 cups seasoned yellow corn flour

1 teaspoon Old Bay Seasoning

1 tablespoon lemon pepper seasoning

1 tablespoon Creole mustard

granulated garlic to taste

¾ cup Blender Hollandaise Sauce (see recipe)

Method:

In a cast iron pot or a home-style fryer such as a FryDaddy, heat oil to 360°F according to manufacturer’s directions. While oil is heating, pan-fry Canadian bacon until lightly browned, set aside and keep warm. When ready to cook, blend seasoned corn flour, Old Bay Seasoning and lemon pepper seasoning, stirring well to incorporate. Dredge oysters in seasoned corn flour mixture and deep-fry until crispy and floating, 2-3 minutes. While oysters are frying, toast English muffins and place 1 muffin half on each plate. Top with Canadian bacon slices and crispy fried oysters. In a small bowl, blend Creole mustard into Hollandaise and divide equally over each muffin half. Serve hot.

ALLIGATOR CHILI

Comment: In Louisiana, alligator is often used as a substitute for other meats, giving us great dishes such as alligator sauce piquant, alligator spaghetti, fried alligator tail and alligator sausage. Here is an old camp recipe for alligator chili that I love.

Ingredients:

3 pounds alligator meat, diced

½ cup vegetable oil

2 cups diced onions

1 cup diced celery

1 cup diced bell peppers

2 tablespoons minced garlic

2 tablespoons diced jalapeño peppers

1 (16 ounce) can pinto beans

3 (8 ounce) cans tomato sauce

1 cup fish stock (see recipe)

1 tablespoon chili powder

1 teaspoon cumin

salt and cracked black pepper to taste

granulated garlic to taste

Method:

In a large Dutch oven, heat vegetable oil over medium-high heat. Add alligator and sauté 20 minutes to render juices. Add onions, celery, bell peppers, minced garlic and jalapeño peppers and sauté 3-5 minutes or until vegetables are wilted, stirring occasionally. Add pinto beans, tomato sauce and stock, stirring to incorporate. Bring to a low boil then reduce to simmer. Stir in chili powder and cumin and cook approximately 1 hour or until alligator is tender, stirring occasionally. Season to taste using salt, pepper and granulated garlic. Ladle into soup bowls or mugs and serve hot with fresh cornbread.

Baccalá Amalfi Style Salted Cod

Though a type of dolphin, Mahi Mahi should not be confused with the mammal.

Hooks, Lies & Alibis

John Folse begins his cookbook, Hooks, Lies & Alibis with a forward describing his boyhood along the Mississippi River, a boyhood stamped indelibly with the place of river, wildlife, fish, swamp and bayou. It is the story of a Cajun boy growing up along the twenty-foot high levee fronting his home in Louisiana’s St James Parish, a marshy land where bar pits along the river caught the overflow and filled with spoonbill catfish, channel cats, garfish, gasperou and sweet Mississippi River shrimp. For John Folse and his five brothers these bar pits were both a playground and the birthplace of an entrepreneurial spirit. Even as children the six boys earned a few pocket dollars with the sale of their fishing bounty from the bar pits and bayous.

By age twelve Folse had graduated to working his lines and traps on the mile-wide mighty Mississippi. But the river was a source of play as much as fishing ground. Folse describes it this way…

‘What we loved most about the shrimp season was that the Mississippi River water was warmed by the June sun and the monkey vines grew long and strong from the willow trees that leaned into the river. A trip to Disneyland could not compare with swinging monkey vines into the river back then. Swimming and swinging were always the payback for a job well done raising shrimp boxes. (Mamere’s stuffed eggplant was just a bonus.) Although we had been warned often of the many perils of swimming in the river, we always enjoyed a dip in Old Muddy. And, the fact is, we couldn’t deny our guilt when asked, “Have you been swimming today?” because our mud-stained Fruit of the Looms gave us away.’

From the river the boys moved into the swamps beyond the cane fields in back of the house. They poled their pirogues into these swamps to a spot where the big gators lived, looking to exercise skills handed down from their father. Following their father’s lessons the boys tied a six-inch steel hook to the end of a quarter-inch thick cord rope and baited it with half a chicken. One boy climbed a willow tree angling over the marsh and tied the cord with hook and bait to a thick branch dangling two feet above the water. In time an eight to ten foot gator leapt with a swish of its tail into the air grabbing the bait and swallowing the hook. Later, poling the bayous of home, the boys learned of the early summer bullfrogs. Excellent in the kitchen pot, they were also a source of income, shipped around the country to biology labs looking for specimens.

Apart from fish, the swamp-floor pantry provided big and small game, game birds and crustaceans, all of which were eaten more often than fish in the Folse household. Crawfish and channel catfish were the two staples, though crawfish did not become popular on Louisiana tables until the late 1950s. For the Folse’s, crawfish was a delicacy. It was Crawfish Bisque on Easter Sunday, Daddy’s River Road Crawfish Stew on Mother’s Day, and late in summer boiled crawfish with corn and potatoes was a common dish.

Folse tells a salty tale about cleaning a large channel cat…

‘Daddy said the head and skin were important because they added that wonderful gelatinous texture to the stew. He removed the gills and whiskers from the catfish, and then, with a Brillo pad in hand, scrubbed the whole fish under running water from the cistern. The slime that protected the fish’s skin had to be removed, and there was nothing better than Brillo for this task. Daddy also claimed that the skin kept the tender meat from falling apart during the two-to-three hour cooking process.’

From a small piece of land in Louisiana’s St James Parish, land strategically located between the river and the swamp, John Folse was bathed in a culture and cuisine that he came to make known worldwide. Mention his name in some circles and heads are filled with mouth-watering thoughts of Louisiana Cajun cooking.

A. Hays Town: An Inside View

Close to one year ago the topic here was Louisiana architect A. Hays Town, and featured photographs of five homes he designed. The focus that time was limited to exterior views, and while that perspective establishes a first and basic impression, the Hays Town continuum passes through exterior walls and extends to equally harmonious interiors.

Rounding a curve in the road and catching first sight of a house by Mr Town can in many cases be a view that momentarily takes the breath away. The perfect marriage of landscape and architecture is evident from each and every perspective, with lines and angles from all vantage points revealing elements of classic Louisiana. Exterior walls in the architect’s design mark passage into another phase of the overall vision. More than any interior decorator, it is the style of Hays Town that defines the interior of his houses. Very likely that the decorator walking into a Hays Town home finds half the work already done. The colors are there, the furnishings recommended. In some cases the architect went as far as recommending a dog to complement the design.

The paired photographs above and below show both sides of six different designs by Mr Town. All photos are by Philip Gould from The Louisiana Houses of A. Hays Town. Five of them are from the earlier post, and are paired this time with an interior view. The photos above show exterior and interior views of the architect’s home in Baton Rouge; the picture on the bottom shows a view into the study.

Here are two views of Witter House, the lower photo showing a view of large windows which bring the live oaks practically into the room.

And Sherar House…

…with a peek into the den from a back glassed-in porch.

A beautiful view of Laborde House with its blooming azaleas…

…and the informal dining room; note the brick floor with a beeswax finish, a treatment common in old Louisiana houses.

A view of Strawitz House…

…and the enclosed rear porch. The weathered boards seen in the exterior fence are repeated as horizontal wall planks inside.

Here is look at the classic Louisiana Bonnecaze House…

A dramatic interior that uses old warehouse beams, plank floors and brick arches.

Wet Leaves

Weather has changed in Louisiana and the cool autumn temperatures with unclouded skies have retreated, been shoved aside by cold temperatures and wintry rain. First sight this morning was of a wet neighborhood soaking under steady rain. A day for sitting around the crackling glow of a fireplace reading or watching one of the several football games on television, getting up once in a while to nibble Thanksgiving leftovers and gaze out at falling rain and patches of brown leaves plastered on brick and car.

But the rain and cold weren’t enough to keep me from going out to look for a recently released book on my watch list. During the two days in New Orleans this week I was in at least half a dozen bookstores, but didn’t see the long awaited second volume of Christopher Isherwood diaries, The Sixties: 1960-1969. Certain that it was scheduled for release in late November, I drove over to Barnes & Noble and found it right off. Got a free one-year B&N member’s card in the process, with the usual $25 fee waived for Black Friday. But a trade-off came in the shape of badly bent reading glasses. Would have sworn they were okay when I walked in the bookstore, but I must have sat on them at some point. I was lucky to find an optician nearby.

The cold, wet weather here is the first I’ve encountered since leaving Japan in April, and perhaps not surprisingly has turned my thoughts to the Tokyo Novembers I am most familiar with. Flipping through the catalog of photos on my iPhone, I uncovered a couple of November snapshots in Japan. Nothing special about them, except that they stir something piquant in my memories. A strawberry plant, dried red peppers, a gingko tree half green, half yellow, ordinary images that in some way or another resonate with the first cold rain of a Louisiana November. A phone call from beachside in Florida tells me that it’s all sun and clear skies over deep ocean blue 700 miles east.

1000 Words

Afternoon in the French Quarter, New Orleans—Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Heading South

We left early this morning headed for points south, for small towns draped in Spanish moss and Cajun history, towns where swamp and bayou are never far away. Perhaps to many unfamiliar with the southern parishes of Louisiana, towns like Breaux Bridge, St Martinville and New Iberia ring no bells and offer up no particular images. The area is a major area of sugar cane production, fields of cane lining many of the old roads; small and old towns settled in the latter half of the eighteenth century, each prominent in French Acadian-Creole culture and history. Breaux Bridge is fifty miles southwest of Baton Rouge and is called by many the “Crayfish Capital of the World.” St Martinville is sixteen miles south of Breaux Bridge and is slightly famous as the site of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s love poem “Evangeline.” New Iberia has a rich Civil War history, and passed a portion of the war as a Union occupied town. These days it is probably most famous as the setting for the hugely popular Dave Robicheaux series of novels by James Lee Burke.

We arrived in Breaux Bridge in time for breakfast at Chez Jacqueline on the main street of the historic district. Not really certain it is an authentic Cajun style of eggs, but we wolfed down plates of fried eggs topped with crawfish etouffee, bowls of grits and a loaf of French bread. First place I’ve ever encountered free refills on the orange juice. Bad luck for us, many of the antique shops were closed, yet tantalizing with views through windows of old junk we wanted to look at and perhaps buy.

A short drive took us to St Martinville where we spent a couple of hours walking around the very expansive Longfellow Evangeline State Park on the banks of Bayou Teche. This is a beautiful park and offers a particularly good example of how the early settlers lived, how they built their homes, lived harmoniously with the local Attakapas, and battled the dangers of climate and disease. A great tour worth going out of the way for.

Last on our roadmap was New Iberia, a place I was especially eager to see because of my enchantment with the images wrought by James Lee Burke in his books. Hard to avoid saying that most of the time here was a disappointment, for no other reason than the shortage of stores and restaurants open for business. We walked blocks up and down, then drove in circles looking for even one place offering something to eat, but could find nothing until the lady in the Allstate office directed us to The Pelicans on the banks of Bayou Teche. Not a fancy place, but they serve a tasty shrimp po-boy.

Back in Barton Rouge around 7:30, and thinking about tomorrow’s trip to New Orleans.

Raymond’s lagniappe…

‘My memories of growing up—the peculiarities around me that were the norm—are like the photographs stored around me, in the attic, in boxes and desk drawers, as book marks in books not finished, some mildewing and yellowing and fading from the dampness of too many tropical storms over the years. My memories are photographs: single instances of a peculiarity that I’ve time-shifted to now and, no doubt, one day, like those rusting tintypes of ancestors stored in a trunk somewhere, those memories will also be subject to the heat and dampness and the stillness of growing old in Louisiana.’ —excerpt from Southern Snapshots

Morning Quiet

The house is quiet early in the morning, unmoving except for a faint churning of mechanical heat somewhere behind walls. One of several cats stalks a moving shadow, slinking soundlessly between chair legs and stacks of books. Now and then comes the hiss and rush of a passing car on the street outside, or the dry crackle of newspaper pages turning, Miz Dee moving from South La. Business to People, seated in a pool of brightening light, her face and coffee cup silhouetted against the glass. From my place among these sofa cushions is a view out onto the 6:30 chill of a patio table still scattered with the leftover tokens of last night’s patio madness. Some bottles and glasses, an empty pack of cigarettes, a candle or two, and the errant leaf blown from the Bradford Pear, now floating with curled edges in a half-glass of beer. In this season the brick tiles are half covered with fallen leaves, a red-brown scatter jostled and shifting in the movement of November air. Birds are few this morning only because their special mix of thistle and sunflower seeds is still in unopened bags, and the feeders are empty of even the last half-hidden morsels. They seem faithless creatures deserting the garden at the first twinge of hunger.

My first full day in town yesterday was a blunt force reminder of the traffic that has characterized Baton Rouge in the aftermath of Katrina. People here will tell you that it all began with the grand exodus from New Orleans before and after the hurricane, and is exacerbated by a lack of infrastructure in the city’s street plan. Wednesday saw me driving in parts of town that I remember as wooded land, but now seethes with service roads, ramps and high speed car chases. Oddly enough the route I followed turned out to be easier than the directions, though it never provided an escape from the hot metal stricture of a thousand moving cars.

In only two days I seem to have become a familiar figure to the neighborhood walkers. For the second morning I encountered a small cast of jogger-walkers, most of whom offer a wave and a friendly smile. While only a few streets away the stream of traffic keeps air heated and grainy, in the virtual forest of Old Goodwood a wealth of green and fewer cars work to keep the air crisp and fresh. It must be related to the concrete surface, but I am walking faster here a distance equal to the Florida walks. Maybe it’s the new shoes.

Raymond’s lagniappe…

‘Summer nights here in Baton Rouge trucks from the Louisiana Department of Insect Control hiss between houses and apartment buildings along adjoining streets, the compressor on the back shooting out a white spray like seeds from the crooked funnel of a harvester. A yellow light flashes on the top of the truck in a neighborhood where once lightning bugs blinked and flitted along childhood streets and among bushes and in treetops, and sometimes die only when caught and their glow smeared across the front of T-shirts.

— excerpt from Southern Snapshots