Down the Bayou…

Chenniere Lake, West Monroe, Louisiana
(the locals call it “Chenny”)

I could tell you about the slow talking coonass who poled up his pirogue with a possum up top his shoulder and proceeded to chant multitudinous incantations…
Not the opossum…the pirogue-ee…
and then when he notice me on the shore he shout,

“Hey, Boudreaux!  You wan’ make purty pitcher, you looka dis!”
He retch down to the water aside his boat and pull up a fishin’ stringer…
With every pull, his effort become more slower and his eyes grew more larger ’til he had drew up six large bream, each with a hole clean  through its middle and on the last hook was danglin’ a writhing water moccasin.
He cry,
“Awww…ya’ll done mess a hole tru ma brim and done swallow da hogsucker whole!
I’s lookin’ to make groceries a dem fo ma supper!
Dang yo hide, mistuh congo!”

mais…ya’ll don’t wan hear none bout dat….

Let’s just say we ‘passed a good time…’ otherwise!

Exactly 47 miles South of Monroe lies the small town of Olla, Louisiana which is where my paternal Grandmother is from.  She is definitely of Cajun descent, so maybe that’s why I felt somewhat ‘at home’ in these swamps.  (I realize that I may have just given some of you the opportunity to comment that I feel at home because I ‘crawled out of a swamp’…but I beat you to it….)

There is  something primeval about these cypress trees growing out of the water with the Spanish moss dangling in the hot breeze, and  the alligator, that holdover from the era of dinosaurs, peeping up over the surface sends a bit of a chill through you.  One would almost feel that witnessing a pterodactyl silently gliding overhead would not seem at all out of place.

“Nanny” was  adept at cooking Cajun dishes.  When I was a youngster, my family would visit Port Arthur, Texas, where Nanny and Pa (Pa worked at the Texas Company refinery there for 25 or 30 years…and he never would buy gasoline anywhere but at a Texaco) resided and where my dad grew up.
After gathering twine, a fishing net and stopping by the neighborhood butcher shop for some soup bones, we would spend the morning on the levee catching a bushel basket of crabs which Nanny would cook for an afternoon feast…some boiled, some ‘bar-b-cued’ and all delicious.

Nanny could and would often cook Cajun delicacies  including pralines, fried chocolate pies and my extreme favorite…
Gumbo!

Everywhere I go that has gumbo on the menu, I’ll order it, knowing that it will rarely live up to…yet still hoping… her gumbo. (I did find some in Lake Charles, Louisiana once that was pretty darn close)

It ‘s in the roux!!!!!

If you find yourself around a Louisiana swamp, don’t go “chunkin’ ” rocks in the water…you might scare up a gator or two… and if you DO scare up one…run in a zig-zag, because they are fast but they don’t turn corners well!

~ by rkpowers on July 5, 2013.