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.

Except one.

There is a lady in Le Marais Perdu who runs a pie stand. The parish paper has mentioned her pralines more than once, and in an Altar Society notice it printed, plain as day, that her pralines are two dollars, and that "the price has not changed since 2017 and it will not."

And it will not.

I drove over in August. Two dollars. I drove over in September. Two dollars. And I have it from her own granddaughter, on the paper's guestbook, that this week a man tried to buy every praline in the case at three dollars apiece, and she told him to "leave some for the town," and sold him two. At two.

Sugar is not two dollars. Pecans are not two dollars. Butter, I do not need to tell you about butter.

I have run the numbers every way I know. There is no way to make a praline that size, with that many pecans, for what she is charging, unless the sugar is coming from somewhere outside the economy. There are cane fields all around that village. There is a mill.

Here is my read. Somewhere in that parish there is sugar that does not go through anybody's books, and there is a woman who knows where it is, and she has decided the people of her town will have pralines at a fair price whether the economy likes it or not. That is not a conspiracy, friends. That is a resistance.

I bought six. They were excellent. I am not going to ask her. You are not going to ask her either.

I relay. You decide.

In Truth and Terror.
— Beau