I thought I knew Louisiana well. I was born in Baton Rouge. We visited my mom's family in Louisiana nearly every year when I was growing up. I played on the Louisiana grasses with my cousins Jonathan and Joanna, picked beans at my Aunt Julia's house and popped their pods apart to fill up a large pale green Tupperware bowl on her porch swing. And I might have dropped a cat from my cousins' Twyla and Lauren's neighbor's raised porch just to see if it would land on its feet. It didn't. I picked blueberries in the trees near my aunt Darlene's house and ate fresh watermelon and homemade ice cream on her lawn between sessions of playing marco polo in the pool with my cousins.
I gazed dreamily at my Grandmother's prided roses and inhaled their heavy scent that infused with the evergreens growing on my Grandaddy's Christmas tree farm and it would overwhelm my senses. I listened as my Grandaddy played his violin while my mom or one of her sisters played the piano and everybody sang hymns together. I slept in pallets on my Grandparents' living room floor with my cousins and my brothers and giggled together in the hush that followed their nightly prayer time as a family, kneeling at the chairs, the couch or the piano bench and marveled at how straightforward my Grandmother was when she spoke to God.
I walked across cattle guards in my bare feet and wandered the acres of my great-grandmother's pecan tree studded farm. I was stranded with my cousin Jennifer in a hay loft in the barn, climbed a giant tractor and sat in it's cockpit just to listen to the radio and feel the AC on a hot summer day and picked grocery sized paper bags full of pecans from the ground to bring back home with us to North Carolina. I stared at the dead rattlesnake floating in a large mason jar on one of her living room side tables as she told us for the 100th time the story of how that thing bit her leg and she killed the snake, took off her bandanna, tied it around her leg and then proceeded to drive herself to the emergency room.
And I also watched as my great-grandmother mowed her acres of grass all by herself at 80-something years old, wearing one of her bonnets reminiscent of the ones I'd seen worn by the girls on Little House on the Prairie. I drank water from a soup ladle hanging at her kitchen sink that everyone else also drank from when they were thirsty between meals and nobody ever got sick from it. I sat at her long kitchen table to feast on every kind of farm-fresh breakfast food imaginable, all made from scratch by her hands.
I ate even more delicious homemade baked goods at my Aunt Ruby's house, gathered eggs from her hens and played on the swing-set in her yard where I learned the words to the Oscar Meyer wiener song for the first time. And I watched in pre-teen disgust as my Uncle Wilton showed us how to feed slop to a bunch of mud-wallering, snorting, stinking pigs. I made bottle rockets out of empty glass coke bottles and firecrackers and played with matches without adult supervision in my Aunt JudyAnn and Uncle David's long gravel driveway with my brothers and my cousins Eric, Jolene and Curtis. But I wouldn't eat the crawfish.
I went to the World's Fair in Louisiana as a teenager in 1984 wearing my multi-colored twisty beads and saw Andy Gibb in concert dancing and singing in his leather parachute pants to 'Shadow Dancing'. After I grew up I kept going back to Louisiana as often as I could to visit my cousin Eric and my other family members and explored New Orleans and its surrounding cities and the wealth of culture it held.
Louisiana has always been a magical place for me, being my birth state and holding so many treasured memories from my childhood and mid-twenties. Donnie and I always found it funny that I spent so much time traveling in and out of Louisiana over the years and we also discovered we were at the World's Fair at the same time and never met. Okay, I know Louisiana is big enough that we wouldn't meet and we probably weren't actually there on the same day, but it just made the world feel a little smaller and him a little closer, even though it took me 28 years to find him and him 30 years to find me.
But when Donnie introduced me to his part of Louisiana for the first time, it was as if I had stepped into a whole other world. We had traveled with our friends Lisa and Ken for Mardi Gras week. We went to a family parade and all the floats passed by screaming Donnie's name and throwing bags of beads and other assorted offerings at his feet. The four of us hung as many beads as possible around our necks, stuffed our shirts and filled our arms with them to bring back with us.
He took me to his Aunt Dolly's house where his cousins, neices and nephews and MawMaw were visiting. There were about 10 or 12 of us standing and sitting around her small kitchen table carrying on 6 conversations at the same time. They were speaking in such thick Cajun accents I could barely understand them. And on top of that, they said their words so quickly, I couldn't get a chance to repeat them in my head to try to make out what they were saying. And on top of that, they were using Creole words that I didn't understand the meaning of and Cajun phrasing that sounded like backwards talking to me.
For example, in my common English I would ask someone, 'How old are you?' or 'Did you see that fast car?' In their Cajun dialect they would say 'How old YOU are?' or 'Mais, you saw dat car go fast fast yeah?' Now imagine those sentences again with the words spoken so quickly they are nearly slurring together with a thick accent connecting them. Now. On top of that... the 6 conversations they were having were inter-connecting. They could jump in and out of and around each conversation at any given moment without stopping and continue right along where they left off in their last conversation.
My. Head. Was. Spinning! I couldn't keep up! They were speaking another language and I wasn't getting it! Donnie would always laugh about how when he looked over at me, my eyes were bugging out, darting back and forth at everyone talking and my mouth was hanging open in shock! Oh it was so funny. Of course I mostly have it down now, although ask my sis-n-law Kristen and she'll tell you I still can't understand her very well over the phone. I always ask her, 'Can you say that again???' and 'What did you say???'.
Donnie and I would sometimes have misunderstandings over our language barrier. One time we were going to the store and as we pulled into the parking lot he asked me "Are you going to get down?" and I was like "Um, what? You want me to dance right here in the parking lot?". I thought he was asking me to get down and boogie-oogie-oogie! The translation was actually "Are you going to go into the store?" Other common miscommunications we had were turning the AC or TV volume up or down. He always said "Speed it up!" or "Slow it down!"... I got confused every time!
When we were planning our wedding we nearly had a huge argument over nothing. He told me he wanted his sister and cousins to "serve" at the wedding. I thought he meant he wanted them to serve the food and drinks at the reception! I couldn't believe he would want that and I told him there was no way and why would he even want them to serve??? He asked me 'Wouldn't you want your brothers to serve?' and I told him 'Of course not!' We were so frustrated with one another. It was a couple days later when I finally realized what he had meant by "serving" was he wanted them to be our bridesmaids and groomsmen! Doh!
The first time I went home with him for a holiday was another shocker for me. I had always been brought up on meals that strictly included a meat, a starch and at least one colorful veggie, maybe even two. My traditional Thanksgiving holiday meal was a balance of Northern foods from my dad and Southern foods from my mom. We usually had turkey and ham, sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows and mashed potatoes with giblet gravy, cornbread stuffing and Yankee stuffing, green bean casserole and cranberry sauce.
When I went to fill my plate at my first Cajun Thanksgiving I walked around my bro-n-law's mom's kitchen expecting the foods I grew up on, searching for and never finding anything green; there was no salad, no green beans, nothing. There was turkey, gumbo, white beans, white rice, dirty rice, jambalaya, potato salad, mashed potatoes and corn. Everything was varying shades of white, brown and yellow. I whispered to Donnie 'Hey, where's the vegetables?' He said 'Over there' and pointed to the white beans! Of course everything was delicious. Every bite I put in my mouth was absolutely delectable. But I was floored that our families ate so differently.
It was kind of like the first time I realized there were people who couldn't or 'shouldn't' sing. I was 16 years old at FCA camp the summer going into my senior year of high school. We were standing in the assembly room, singing praise and worship and the girl beside me, who was a lot of fun, was singing wholeheartedly out of key with all that she had in her little body. I started cracking up and elbowed her and said 'Stop it! You're killing me! You're so funny! Cut it out!' I mean, I was rolling, almost in tears crying because it was SO bad and SO hilarious. She turned and looked at me with confusion, all doe eyed and innocent and said 'WHAT are you talking about???' That's when it dawned on me that there were people in this world who couldn't sing. 'Oh, um, nothing...' I said, and turned back towards the front and joined the singing again, very sheepishly.
My initial experiences on the bayou felt similar, but I quickly grew accustomed to the differences in 'his Louisiana' and 'my Louisiana'. I grew past the culture shock and found a lot of common ground and embraced the lifestyle of the bayou. Everywhere we went everyone knew Donnie. It amazed me how well loved and well known he was. If we went to Walmart we would inadvertently end up spending a couple of hours there because we would meet someone on every aisle and have a 20 minute conversation. When we went to church there it was as if Elvis was in the building. We couldn't walk 2 feet without being stopped by somebody. It was overwhelming every time and in some ways I seriously felt like the wife of a celebrity. It was awesome.
At first every aspect of being on the bayou was new, different, exciting and sometimes challenging. But now, as soon as we drive into town for a visit and see the bayou running through the middle of it with the houseboats, fishing boats and crab boats and we see the boys and old men fishing alongside the bayou, it feels like home. Our ears itch to hear the Cajun accents and our taste buds scream for the Cajun foods. There's always a freshly made mouth watering gumbo or another yummy Cajun dish and a warm pair of arms to welcome us wherever we decide to stop first.
The heritage is amazing, the food is phenomenal, the accents are thick, the people are loving and the time we have there is absolutely priceless. It's not the same without Donnie, but his Louisiana has become my Louisiana too. Now I have two families waiting for me to visit when I cross the state lines and that thought is so very heartwarming to me.
But I still won't eat the crawfish.
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