Mailbag: Room to Walk Around
from where i stopped.
Two letters this week, and a phone message I am counting as a letter because the caller spelled out the punctuation.
The Satsuma Boxes at the Road Are Not Free. I Checked.
free, it says. read the small print.
Every November the satsumas come in at once, faster than any family can eat them, and the boxes show up at the end of the driveways. FREE, the signs say. The parish paper ran them this week as a nice little item. I have driven these roads for twenty years, and I am here to tell you that the satsuma box is the most sophisticated economy in the basin.
Follow the Lime
provided free. somebody kept the sack.
Every November 1, Le Marais Perdu whitewashes its family tombs for Toussaint. The Village provides lime. Volunteers bring brushes. That last distinction is printed so often I began to wonder who was paying for the first part.
I Whitewashed a Tomb That Is Not Mine
the brush is mine. the names are not. i keep them anyway.
Today is Toussaint. I do not usually post on it. This one is short, written early, before I go out with a bucket.
The Clocks Fall Back Sunday. I Have Questions About the Hour.
1:14. the first one. i stayed for the second.
Sunday at two in the morning the clocks go back to one, and everybody in this basin gets an hour nobody earned. The parish paper says it is one more hour of sleep for most people and one more hour of fishing for the Sheriff. That is accurate reporting, and it is also the problem.
Heavy Pecan Year. Everybody Has a Reason.
one tree. one night. the truck was clean at supper.
The pecans are coming down heavy this fall. The parish paper called the crop fair at the start of the month, and with respect, the paper has not parked under my tree. You know it is heavy if you own a truck, because they are in the bed of it, and if you own a roof, because they land on it at four in the morning, one at a time, all night.
The Bookmobile Is Back. The Part Came From Ohio.
due november 18. same atlas. i checked.
In September I laid out what I called the Ohio Theory, DocFenwick laid out why I was wrong, and the board laid out a thread that is still going. One item on my list was the parish bookmobile, off its route since June, waiting on a part. The part was coming from Ohio.
Nobody Named the Hog
8:15 a.m. too late. it was always going to be too late.
The parish paper keeps telling us that the boucherie hog was found and that nobody named it. It said so before Feu Follet Weekend. It will, I am sure, say it again when it writes up the boucherie, which happened Saturday morning, which I did not cover, and which I attended for reasons of cracklins.
Three of This Week's Secrets Were Recipes. I Am Not Printing Them.
three cards. one envelope. none of your business.
The Submit a Secret box got eleven entries this week. Two were about the cow. Four were about the festival, which I am still not covering. One was a grocery list somebody sent by mistake, and I hope you found the eggs.
Mailbag: What Your Grandmother Said About October
a reader's kitchen. the pile stays till morning.
Last month I asked for the rules your grandmothers gave you that nobody ever explained. I meant it as a small thing. The box is full. Here are three, from three people who do not know each other, and then I will stop, because some of you are starting to worry me.
The Cow Is Not the Sheriff's
dawn, monday. she looked at me first.
The Sheriff in Le Marais Perdu has now made two public statements, one in the parish paper and one on its front-page ticker, regarding a brown cow on the levee road. The first said she is not the Sheriff's. The second said she is STILL not the Sheriff's, in capital letters.
Pralines Are Still Two Dollars. I Did the Math.
the math. it does not work. it does not have to.
There is a praline stand in this basin that has charged two dollars a praline since 2017. The parish paper reports the price every few months, the way other papers report the price of gas, and every time it adds the same four words: and it will not.
Mailbag: Black Snow
a reader's line, monday morning. she shook it out twice.
Grinding started, and the mail changed. It does every October. For about three months the letters stop being about what people saw on the water and start being about what is coming down on their laundry.
Why I Am Not Covering the Festival
the lineup, as pinned. the last line is not the same pen.
Everybody asks. The parade was two weekends ago and a third of the mailbag since then is people asking why there is no festival post, and I keep saying there is one, it is the parade night post, go read it, it is about the count. That is the festival post. And no, I am not going to Feu Follet Weekend either.
Mailbag: Three Lanterns, No Oil
reader's porch. she says it was on the rail when she got home. she says it was on.
Three letters in one week, three different landings, same story: a lantern, found lit, that does not take oil.
Low Water, and What It Hands Back
that boat was floating on tuesday. nobody moved it. the water moved.
The water is down. If you live on it you already know. If you do not, go stand at any landing in this basin and look at the line on the pilings where the water was in August, and then look at where it is now, and then look at what is lying on the mud in between.
1610 AM Read a Name I Knew
pulled over. engine off. you are not supposed to stop. i stopped.
Short one. I do not want to write it long.
The Icehouse Is Under New Management (Again)
the hooks. do not count them. i did not count them.
The Village's own web site keeps a business directory, and if you have never read it, go read it, because it is seven lines long and every line is a confession. The Icehouse, at the landing: ice, fuel, coffee. Under new management.
Parade Night, Counted
sarrazin cut, after the last boat. counted twice.
I went to the parade. I know. I have told you for years that the first weekend of October is the one weekend I stay out of Le Marais Perdu, and I went, and I stood on the bank of the Sarrazin Cut with everybody else and watched the boats come through with their lanterns, and I counted.
The 1987 Uniforms
found on the fence after the game. one button short. they always are.
I do not follow football. I want that on the record before anybody on the board starts. But I read the parish paper in Le Marais Perdu, and the paper has started printing something about the high school band that I cannot stop thinking about.
Two Dollars Since 2017
the card has not been rewritten since 2017. the ink faded. the price did not.
Everything has gone up. You know this. I know this. A gallon of gas, a sack of rice, a pound of crawfish in season, a box of shells, a tank of propane for the boil. I keep a notebook of prices because I keep a notebook of everything, and since 2017 every line in that notebook has climbed, some by half, some by double.
The Ohio Theory
i circled it. i went over it three times. it is still there.
I want to lay something out tonight, and I want you to read the whole thing before you write me, because I know what some of you are going to say, and I know DocFenwick has already typed the first line of it.
Alligator Season, and the One Gator With a Lawyer
the door. the handwriting is a priest's. you can tell by the commas.
Wild alligator season is open in the east zone, which means that for the next month the state of Louisiana has issued a set number of tags, each with a number on it, and every licensed hunter in this basin is out with a line and a tag looking to put that tag on a gator.
Three of You Burned Palm
a reader's galerie, tuesday night. she says it was her mama's saucer.
I am going to keep this one shorter than usual, because the board did most of the work this week and I want to thank them first. Four nights, one storm, two hundred and eighty-eight posts, and not one real name, not one road, not one face. That is a board that knows the rules when it counts. I burned nothing in the stove this week. I am proud of you.
Napoleon Has Been Seen in Four Places at Once
7:52 pm. the same bird? you tell me.
The classifieds in the parish paper have carried a lost-rooster ad since early summer. One rooster, answers to Napoleon. Reward: gumbo. I clipped it the first week, because I clip everything, and I would have forgotten it, except that the readers of this blog have not.
Correlation Is Not Causation, Doc. But It Is Correlation.
my chart. the dip is when he got the alternator.
Regular readers know the parish paper ran a story in June: Rougarou sightings in Le Marais Perdu down forty percent since a local man known as Thib got his truck fixed. I laughed. I want to be honest with you, I laughed. I filed it under the paper being the paper.
The Mosquito Truck Is Not Spraying for Mosquitoes
the route. not the route they print.
Every summer night between nine and eleven, a pickup truck with a fogging rig in the bed drives the streets of every little town in this basin, leaving a white cloud in the road behind it. You have all seen it. Your children have chased it on bicycles, which you should not let them do. The parish says it sprays for mosquitoes.
He Is Not There for the Homily
after mass. back left. the cushion was still damp at noon.
The parish paper in Le Marais Perdu reports this week that the church there has blessed a pew for an alligator, and that the alligator, a twelve-foot male the town calls Monsieur Boudreaux II, now attends the 9 o'clock Mass on the left side, stays through the second collection, and leaves during the closing hymn.
The Parish Paper Prints More Truth Than It Knows
delivered on time. the door was like that.
There is a little town paper out of Le Marais Perdu (The Marsh Chronicle, and I will keep linking it until one of us gets a cease and desist) that I have read faithfully for years, and I want you to go read it too, because it is the single richest primary source in this basin and it does not know it. This month alone, and I am not exaggerating any of this: an alligator has begun attending mass, and the church's response was to bless a pew. A classified ad seeks a night watchman for the icehouse whose only stated requirement, besides punctuality, is that he not count the coats on the hooks. The fishing column, the fishing column, casually warns readers off a slough where the fish bite too eagerly, on the reasoning that, quote, fish that eager are recruiting.
Count the Lights. Odd Means You Go Inside.
the treeline, thursday
A letter, from a reader out past a landing I won't name:
“The lights used to keep to the treeline. Every night now they arrange a little closer to the camp. Last Thursday they made my initials. My cousin says swamp gas. Beau, swamp gas doesn't know my initials.”
The Krewe That Never Parades Before Dark
sender unknown. postmark local.
There is a social club uptown (old name, older money) that has run a charity blood drive every year since anyone can remember, and here is a fact I have now confirmed with two separate drivers: the collection van does not go to the blood bank. It goes to a private courier depot on the river, and the manifest says catering.
Where the Basin Gets Angry
survey stake, circle of dead equipment
There is a stretch of the Atchafalaya (I will not print the coordinates, and by the end of this post you will know why I don't have to) where a pipeline project quietly rerouted itself in 2019 at a cost of forty million dollars, and the official reason in the filing is, and I quote, “geotechnical considerations.”
1610 AM, After Midnight
the stretch where it comes in clear. do not stop.
Licensed to nobody, broadcast from nowhere the FCC can triangulate (and yes, people have asked them), there is a station at the bottom of the AM dial that only comes in on the highway stretches between towns, and only well after midnight. A woman's voice, level as a phone operator, reading names. First, middle, last. Pause. Next name.
