With the corn half-grown and the rising heat of summer melting and bubbling the tarred-road boundaries of my world, our great migration began. From a secure and well-loved home eight blocks east and five blocks north of the courthouse square, I was to be uprooted and carried to a house nine blocks west and thirteen blocks south of that same square. It might as well have been Uzbekistan. They can move without me, I thought. They can have their new house. I’ll stay here. They’ll be sorry…

A morose and angry twelve year old, I pitched my version of a fit. I refused to talk. I refused to pack. I didn’t want to move. I may not yet have absorbed the word “subdivision”, but I’d seen the reality. Flat, barren and treeless, its low, porchless houses ambled through bare and dusty plots of land.  There were no cherry trees to climb, no patches of wild asparagus, no hollyhocks to pluck and stitch into fragile, short-lived dolls.

On the other hand, the new house did offer a turquoise bedroom and twin big-girl beds. When my parents discovered a favorite school chum’s family would be living only two blocks away, there was the gift of a grown-up bicycle and unexpected permission to ride it to her house.  I grew less morose, particularly when my parents mentioned there would be a party. I’d never heard of house-warmings, but I knew about parties.

In the late 1950s, we wore gloves to church, dressed for town and cut crusts off our sandwiches. When an occasion for a party presented itself, the same attention was paid  to detail and “proper form”. Days – perhaps even weeks – were spent planning and preparing the menu. There would be individual cheese balls, tiny cream puff shells for shrimp or crab and cocktail meatballs no larger than grapes. There would be colored toothpicks galore sporting little chunks of this and that, and above all, there would be drinks.

On the night of the house-warming, one friend of my father who’d had a few of those drinks wandered away and had to be fetched back from the cornfields. The hunt was easy and hilarious, since he was belting out an indeciperable song con spirito, but the true highlight of the evening was the acknowledgement of my parents’ accomplishment.

Most of their friends had come to our small Iowa town within a few years of each other, and most of the men worked together as engineers at Maytag.  They knew each other well, and had grown into a close-knit community. World War II had affected them all, and its reminders were everywhere. Rebuilding – lives, relationships, a country – was the name of the game, and building a new house as part of that rebuilding effort was well worth celebrating.

For my father, the son of an Iowa coal miner, a survivor of the depression and an engineer by virtue of knowledge and skill rather than academic degrees, the experience was especially sweet. He was rightfully proud of his accomplishments and of the doggedness that had made the house possible. When the community gathered around he and Mom for a night of affectionate celebration, the gifts they brought and the congratulations they offered warmed even the heart of this formerly morose twelve-year-old girl.

Musing over my parents’ housewarming today, I realize anew how important that sense of community was for them.  After the complexities of building a house, after so many hours spent in the process – meeting  architects, pulling permits, revising plans, dealing with cost overruns – it had to have been unbelievably touching to be surrounded by friends offering gifts and congratulations, friends eager to tell them in a multitude of ways, “It looks wonderful”.

Eventually I had my own “house-warmings”, though they were, strictly speaking, dorm room-warmings, cottage-warmings and apartment-warmings. Still, each occasion was touched by joy, gratitude, a sense of adventure and the sheer pleasure of sharing new surroundings with friends.

When this blog was new and readers of my first, tentative postings on another site showed up for a “blog-warming”, I was utterly charmed. I’d never thought of transferring the concept of house-warming to a blog, but I liked it immediately. Even with widgets and links still fighting over placement and a few boxes of paragraphs and images still waiting to be unpacked, I didn’t mind guests.

After all the solitary hours at the computer, after all of the revisions and unworkable plans and mysterious obstacles encountered while trying to create something pleasing, it was wonderful to have friends stop by with their virtual covered dishes, cinnamon pinwheels and bottles of wine, saying, “It looks wonderful.”

Today, Google shows 10,700,000 entries for housewarmings, but only 9,520 for blog-warmings.  I’m not surprised, and I certainly don’t expect Martha Stewart, Nigella Lawson or Ree Drummond to pick up on the trend and publish blog-warming recipes or lists of virtual gifts.

But those who are part of this sometimes brave, occasionally snarky and offensive but always entertaining new world, those who are helping to re-shape old traditions  in new and creative ways, know the truth. Human beings are meant to connect. Laughter and good wishes are an appropriate response to new adventures, and gratitude for what has been often walks hand in hand with joy in new possibilties. Whether it’s a traditional house-warming or a modern blog-warming, the point is the same: life is better in community.

In the old days, there was a common Irish blessing for house-warmings.

May the roof above us never fall in
And may we good companions beneath it never fall out.

For our new day, the old blessing still applies, though slightly amended for people who have yet to meet.

May the hard drive that connects us never crash,
And may we good companions around it never clash.

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With a good boat, good weather and a guide raised up in the swamps, we might have been able to thread our way eastward by water, to the other side of the Basin. But for the automobile-bound, topography is destiny. To cross the Atchafalaya and reach the Mississippi levees, we’d have to trade gravel and blacktop for concrete, throwing in a few bridges along the way. “I guess we’ll head north to I-10, take it across the basin and then head south again at Grosse Tête,” I said. “Sounds good to me.” My friend brushed the last crumbs of French bread from her lap. “I was hoping you weren’t going to wait for James Carville to show up on his flaming alligator.“

Retracing our route across the pontoon bridge I’d laughingly dubbed Le Pont Steampunque in honor of its quirky appearance, we turned north along the river, passing camps of every sort (“camp” being a word used to describe homes found in and along Louisiana’s waterways and wilderness areas). It was surprisingly quiet. Apart from hunters and dog-walkers, few creatures were stirring, although the couple working the counter at the local convenience store assured us plenty of weekenders were back on the river for the holiday.

Reaching Interstate 10, the main east-west route from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, Florida, we found traffic heavy on the parallel bridges crossing the Basin. Savvy travelers, we’d made a stop for all the necessities before beginning our swamp-crossing. A modern eighteen-mile bridge may not seem like much of a challenge, but accidents do happen, especially where bridge lanes merge near the Whiskey Bay Pilot Channel and the Atchafalaya River itself. When bridge traffic stops, stories are born. Cadence Lanté posted a photo of her Basin bridge experience on Flickr and added,

 The longest I have been stopped on the bridge was nearly three hours. Any time there is an accident, all traffic stops and people get out and walk around and visit. I usually get stuck about once a year. ALWAYS fill your tank, go to the restroom and have food and drink along before getting on this 17 [sic] mile long bridge!

While Laissez les bons temps rouler! may not be your first reaction to a traffic accident, there’s no question Louisiana life can be a little laid-back, a good bit humorous and often quite charming. Consider, for example, the matter of “The Sunshine Bridge”. 

We discovered the bridge after a trouble-free transit across the Atchafalaya Basin. Turning off Interstate 10 and winding southward with the river through the towns of Plaquemine, Bayou Goula, Modeste and Donaldsonville, we finally crossed the Mississippi on the original “bridge to nowhere”, a beautiful span that carried little more than farm traffic and sugar cane trucks after its completion in 1964.

Prior to its construction, the only way for traffic to cross the river between the Huey P. Long bridges at Baton Rouge and New Orleans was by ferry boat. When the new bridge replaced the Donaldsonville ferry, many thought it should be named for James Davis, who served two terms as Louisiana Governor.  Davis demurred, asking instead that the bridge be named for one of his greatest non-political accomplishments. Davis was a musician, and his biggest hit, You Are My Sunshine,  apparently was as popular with Louisiana’s bridge-naming authorities as it was with my family. The Sunshine Bridge it was, and is, and the next time I pass over it, I’ll sing a chorus or two in honor of the good Governor.

South of the Sunshine Bridge, the highway flows in tandem with the river it traces, unforced and easy.  Only miles now from Gramercy and Lutcher, focused on the bonfires ahead and lulled by the slightly soporific effect of watching miles of levee unwind, we might have missed a bit of bonfire history had the stand of enormous live oaks not caught our eyes and drawn our attention.

Glistening slightly in the thin December sunlight, their artful drapings of Spanish moss were beautiful.

Then we saw the house, surrounded and embraced by the marvelous oaks.

A scaled-down version of  Great River Road plantation homes, the house was completed in 1836. It served as the President’s House for the College of Jefferson, an institution chartered in 1831 to educate the sons of plantation owners along the Mississippi River.

A fire destroyed the original Main Building in 1841. After rebuilding in 1842, the College of Jefferson was back in business.  Twenty years later, during the conflict some still refer to as The War of Northern Aggression, the Main Building was occupied by Union Forces, from 1862 to 1864.

In 1864, Valcour Aime, reputed to be the world’s leading sugar producer, possibly the richest man in Louisiana and certainly the owner of the Jefferson College property, transferred the College to the Marist Fathers.  After Federal forces withdrew, the school was reestablished as St. Mary’s Jefferson College and continued operating under that name until 1927.  In 1931, the Jesuit Fathers of New Orleans purchased the College, renaming it Manresa House of Retreats. The President’s House became Ignatius House, and this historical gem in the heart of St. James Parish now is regarded as one of the premier retreat centers in the world.

Much to our surprise, the roots of the bonfire tradition in Louisiana’s river parishes (St. James, St. John the Baptist and Ascension) lie tangled with the history of Jefferson College. Marcia Gaudet, who has written extensively about the practice, notes that bonfires probably were not customary among the original Acadian and German settlers of the area. Instead, they may have been reintroduced by nineteenth century French immigrants.

Father Louis Poche, a Jesuit priest and native of St. James Parish, remembers hearing from his family that the bonfire custom in Louisiana was started in St. James by the French Marist priests who came to Louisiana after the Civil War to teach at Jefferson College…

In a recent oral history project on bonfires, the German-Acadian Coast Historical and Genealogical Society found oral documentation that a former Jefferson College student, George Bourgeois, began building bonfires in Mt. Airy (near Gramercy) in 1884 and that he had known the custom as a student of the Marist priests (Guidry 1990).

There’s no question the French expression for bonfire, feu de joie or “fire of joy”, is relatively common along the levees. In France, feux de joie often accompanied celebrations on the eves of Christmas, New Year’s and Epiphany.  While the practice has waned in France, levee bonfires in Paulina, Gramercy and Lutcher (as well as smaller community and family bonfires) surely are part of that tradition.

Some say the first bonfires were lit to ease the way for those attending midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Others suggest their pupose was to help guide boats through wintertime fogs, and many believe without their light Papa Noël would have a hard time of it navigating the bayous and river. In the end, an even simpler explanation may help to account for their enduring appeal. When I asked a man setting up lawn chairs across from a fire-cracker-wrapped teepee, “What’s the best thing about doing this?” he straightened up and grinned from ear to ear. ” This how we pass a good time, cher! You know – we have fun!”

On the levee, a bonfire isn’t built in a day. These fires bear no resemblance to leaves burning in a side yard, or refuse and trash set ablaze on the back forty. These carefully constructed, teepee-shaped structures built of willow logs, bamboo, blackjack vine and cane reeds have their own traditions.  The construction process seems to be as much an attraction as the actual fires, and more people than I’d imagined make multiple trips to the levee just to watch the progress as logs are hauled in, center poles set and  calculations made.

There have been changes, of course. In 1984, Ronald St. Pierre, Mayor of Gramercy, decided to build a bonfire shaped like a Cajun house. By all accounts, 64,000 people showed up to have a look, and that was only the beginning. With a certain pride, St. Pierre says, “The year I built this river boat, I had traffic tied up from Gramercy to Gonzalez to LaPlace on I-10 and all the roads coming in.” 

Personally, I would have enjoyed seeing St. Pierre’s cane wagon and tractor, or his replica of Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose”. But there were plenty of non-traditional bonfires this year, all equally delightful.

There was a distinctly non-Cajun reindeer…

There was Papa Noël in his pirogue, pulled by his eight faithful alligators – Gaston, Tiboy, Pierre, Alcee, Ninette, Suzette, Celeste and Renee...

There was a reminder of the true meaning of the season, accompanied by fervent hopes that the Holy Family and their visitors would be removed before the fires were lit…

There was a traditional teepee that looked as though it might have connections to the LSU engineering department…

And their supervisor…

There was an airboat, in case Papa Noël was late, or faced with thin water…

And an off-road vehicle that seemed perfectly at home perched atop the levee.

In the end, we chose not to stay for the fires. Our decision to lodge in Breaux Bridge rather than Baton Rouge meant we would be making a long drive home on unfamiliar roads, and that seemed unwise. Instead, we walked the levee, admired the handiwork, chatted with other levee-walkers and imagined what it would be like to see the Christmas Eve darkness filled with light.  Perhaps next year we’ll return, and a new tradition will be born.

Later that night in Breaux Bridge, with dinner over and the town shuttered-up for Christmas Eve, I stepped onto the gallery of the old boarding house. Rising dampness muffled even the sound of an occasional car shushing across the lift bridge and softened the laughter rippling across the bayou.

Picking my way down the steps and through drifts of unraked leaves, I made my way to the Teche, to the landing where travelers disembarked in days when the bayou remained navigable and commerce flowed between its banks. Watching the water whorl and flow, I thought about the levee, where the fireworks were ending and the bonfires had burned themselves into ash. The airboat, the stable, the reindeer, teepees and truck – all were gone.

Some years ago, William F. Fagan interviewed Mayor St.Pierre about his own extraordinary bonfire creations. Fagan noted the creativity of the projects, and the amount of time, effort and skill that had gone into making them. Looking at a photograph of St. Pierre’s great bonfire train, the “Gramercy Express”, Fagan asked, “All this, Mr. Mayor, just to burn?”  With a smile, St. Pierre replied, “Just to burn.”

Thinking of that smile, I smile myself. Perhaps a lifetime of bonfire experience has given the good Mayor a glimpse of an even larger truth. We, too, are bundles of memory and hope, structures of longing and expectation built upon the landscape of history. It is our fate to burn, to be consumed by one kind of flame or another.  If we are blessed to be set alight with torches of curiosity, commitment, passion and care, we have a chance to become the best kind of fire – a fire of of joy, lighting the way for travelers in the dark.

This is the third of three entries about a Christmas-time trip into Louisiana’s Acadiana. Click here for Part One: Over the Bayous and Through the Swamp
Click here for Part Two: Rising and Shining – An Atchafalaya Tale
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Bidding us adieu at the doorway of Café Des Amis on the Friday before Christmas, Mary Lynn was emphatic. “Remember,” she said, “you’re going to have to rise and shine if you want to get a table for tomorrow’s Zydeco breakfast.”

No innkeeper could be more attentive, more determined than Mary Lynn to help her guests savor their experience in her world, but her words evoked memories even sweeter than the Gâteau de Sirop we enjoyed our first night in Breaux Bridge.  “Rise and shine!” my mother would say, drawing back the morning curtains. “Rise and shine!” my dad would echo, coaxing me into the day, tempting me with the promise of adventure.

Cheerful and comfortable, “rise and shine” became a childhood staple, an assurance that the challenges, trials and delights of the day ahead would be well worth the effort of throwing back the covers. With passing years, the phrase took on added weight, becoming a cautionary reminder that just getting up isn’t enough. It’s not enough to plod into the day, slogging through it as though life itself is a burden and an imposition. Being called to get up is one thing. Being willing to shine is another.

Back at Bayou Teche, our bed-and-breakfast home, another memory began to stir. “Rise and shine” had been a common expression in my childhood home, but it also served as the hallmark signature of a blogger I’ve never met, an Atchafalaya River basin-dweller named Jim Delahoussaye, whose writings during last spring’s floods were straightforward and compelling. As far back as 2005 he was ending each blog entry with the phrase, “Rise and shine”.  I liked it, finding that, and much else about his blog, appealing. Now that we were in his neighborhood, a visit seemed in order.

“You know,” I said to Carolyn, “they have the Zydeco breakfast every Saturday. There’s no reason we couldn’t come back on another weekend…” “Well,” she said, “A big breakfast certainly isn’t at the top of my list after that dinner. Got another idea?” Peering at the map, I considered, finally giving voice to my impulse. “Since we’re heading that direction anyway, I think I’d like to go down to Butte La Rose and find the bridge.” “What bridge?”  “The throwback,” I said. “The weird one. The pontoon bridge that looks like a cross between a Steampunk fantasy and an outlandlish Rube Goldberg project.”

Not blinking an eye, the best traveling companion in the world said, “I’m in. What’ll we do for breakfast?”

Breakfast turned out to be dark, rich coffee and fresh-from-the-oven French bread from T-Sue’s bakery on the Henderson Highway, just east of Breaux Bridge proper. Like bread produced by LeJeune’s in Jeanerette or Poupart’s in Lafayette, it was crusty yet tender, hot and just slightly yeasty, delicious even without butter or jam.  Like a levee road, the loaves were straight and simple, although, as we traveled toward Butte La Rose, it was impossible not to consider the sad consequences for both of too much moisture.

On May 23, 2011, as the Mississippi River crest worked its way southward and backwater flooding had become an immediate concern for the entire Atchafalaya basin, a mandatory evacuation order was posted for Butte LaRose, an off-the-beaten-track community tucked into the basin.  The formal notices were terse: “Back water flooding is beginning to approach some structures in the Butte Larose area. Therefore, the mandatory evacuation order will be reinstated in the Butte Larose area on Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 12:00 p.m. Entry into the area will be prohibited and [the order] will be strictly enforced…”

The week the decision was made to flood the Atchafalaya basin in order to save Baton Rouge and New Orleans, I wrote:

So. The engineers have calculated, the scientists have pondered, the advisors have advised and the decision-makers have decided. The Bird’s Point levee has been blown apart, the river is being allowed to run free through the Bonnet Carre Spillway and the Morganza Spillway gates are being raised, one by one.

I have no real quarrel with any of this. I’ve followed the decision-making process as best I can, and I understand the rationale. But like so many who claim even the slightest connection to the Atchafalaya, to Cajun country and to the area’s warm, friendly and often downright quirky people, I was immensely saddened to see the waters begin to pour into the Atchafalaya Basin, scattering wildlife and sending its people fleeing to higher ground.

If I’m cheered at all, it’s by the knowledge that a goodly portion of the folks in Louisiana are what my grandfather used to call “britches hitchers”. Faced with a challenge, with adversity or grief, they “hitch up their britches” and get on with it.

Jim Delahoussaye, a resident of Butte La Rose, recently mentioned a friend, a catfisherman who’d pulled a rib trying to run lines that were too tight. “You can’t always fight,” said Jim, reflecting on his friend’s experience. There comes a time when it’s “best to let it go, and start over when this statement by the river has been made.”

In the end, the river’s statement was less than apocalyptic. There was flooding, and there were damaged structures. There was mud to be cleaned away, and creatures of every sort to be returned to their natural habitat. Still, as Delahoussaye wrote on June 2, it could  have been worse.

Some houses got flooded, to be sure, but those are mostly on an elevation not much different from the forest floor. The river bank didn’t flood. At 29 feet it would have gone over the bank for the first time in recorded history, I believe, but not at 23.5 feet. Perhaps some places on the river got flooded in 1973 when the crest was 27 feet, but not many.  Basically… Butte La Rose was not seriously impacted by the high water of 2011.

Other consequences resulted less from actual flooding than from sustained fear and anxiety.  In his entry of June 7, Delahoussaye says,

We had a near-miss, not a full blown catastrophe, but some people are leaving the community forever because of an emotional response to the threat. One family has been here for 37 years, and they are now looking for a house to buy elsewhere, where the water cannot come.

Driving toward the levee on a quiet road lined with houses of every sort (camps, as they are called), it was hard to imagine anyone leaving Butte La Rose. We remarked especially on the yard signs, as creative and quirky as their owners. Some are humorous, sporting such slogans as Dad’s Pad When Mom’s Mad. Others have a certain elegance (Bayou de Betsy) while still others appear to declare their owners’ intention to live out their days far from the madding crowd, whatever the river may bring.

Finally, as we neared the end of the camp-lined road, the bridge for which we were searching appeared. With the river in full flood, it had been taken apart and secured in order to prevent damage. Now, with the waters receded, it had been reassembled in all its rusted glory, becoming once again a sturdy, dependable and just vaguely humorous link to the outside world.

Creaking across the bridge I’d christened Le Pont Steampunque, we came to the top of the levee. From that vantage point, the world appeared orderly and secure.  Once again banked and slow-moving, the Atchafalaya slouched its way toward the Gulf.  A pair of hunters crossing the old bridge in their truck waved, and turned southward along the levee road that would take them to Catahoula.  Near the edge of the bayou, a man in no particular hurry stopped to speak to the dog trailing him, doling out an absent-minded scratch behind the dog’s ears as a single poule d’eau watched from the water’s edge.

Later, at the convenience store on the Atchafalaya Highway, the couple behind the counter had few customers and time to talk: about the water, about the flood of attention that innundated their town, about the blessedness of ordinary days. Rise and shine, I thought, listening to them. Rise and shine. The river will have its day, but for now it’s enough to rejoice in the river’s fall, delight in the rising sun and let the sweet glow of gratitude shine in your eyes, you who escaped to tell the tale.

But there was no time to linger. It was Christmas eve, with miles to go.

And we still hadn’t gotten to the bonfires…

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This is the second of three entries about a Christmas-time trip into Louisiana’s Acadiana. Click here for Part One: Over the Bayous and Through the Swamp

My friend Sabine, French and unflappable, introduced me to the phrase.  “Plus ça change,” she’d murmur with a wave of her hand, “plus c’est la même chose.”  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Sometimes that’s true. My great-aunt Fannie, who just happened to be in the Louisiana State Capitol the day Carl Weiss put a bullet into Huey Long, never tired of telling the story. He wasn’t the first or the worst of the politicians she’d known, she liked to say, but he certainly set a standard of some sort for those who followed. Rolling her eyes heavenward as she ticked off the names of politicians who’d ticked her off, she’d heave a great sigh and remind us:  “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

More recently, several of us were sitting in a restaurant when another friend began fussing at the sight of some scantily-clad young lovelies lounging at the bar. “Who let them out of the house looking like that?” she said. “I don’t know,” said another. “Who let us out of the house with our skirt waistbands rolled up and our bobby sox rolled down?”  We grinned at one another, and it occurred to me to think again, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”.

Unfortunately, when Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr introduced the now-familiar epigram into his satirical journal Les Guêpes in 1849, he neglected to include its natural corollary. Sometimes, the more things change, the more things change. There’s nothing we can do about it, and nothing ever will be the same again.  Nowhere is that reality more visible than at holiday-time.

During this first Christmas season since my mother’s death, I was tempted by three common options available to anyone faced with radical and irreversible change. I could pretend nothing had changed. I could try to re-create the past, or I could denigrate the life we’d shared, asserting against all reason it had no value and wasn’t worth remembering.

None of those options seemed desirable – or even feasible – as another friend and I talked over our situation. With no family of her own, Carolyn had spent many years at our holiday table and her own Christmas celebrations had been equally disrupted by Mom’s death.

We needed a fourth option.

In the week before Christmas, I discovered that fourth option. Browsing online for information about piñon, one thing led to another until I found myself reading about traditional bonfires in St. James Parish, Louisiana. Since the 1800s, huge Christmas Eve bonfires have burned along the Mississippi River levee in towns like Lutcher, Vacherie and Gramercy, guiding Papa Noël to the bayous – sometimes a hundred fires, sometimes more.

Bonfires? I thought. On Christmas Eve? On the levees? I’d never heard of such a thing. I looked at a map. I browsed some articles. I picked up the phone and called Carolyn. “Listen,” I said. “we can sit home this Christmas and stare at each other, or we can head over to Cajun country and enjoy the bonfires.” “What bonfires?”, she asked. “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll explain later.”

Within an hour, plans were made. I called Breaux Bridge, to see if a room might be available at my favorite old City Hotel, now Bayou Teche bed and breakfast. Mary Lynn’s laughter rippled all the way back to Texas.  “What kind of question is that? Of course there’s room at the inn. Even if there weren’t, you could stay in the shed with the pirogue!” 

At that point, I would have settled for a shed with a pirogue.  Sometimes the only good answer for too much change is a little more change,  and a Cajun Christmas sounded exactly right. We left early, on the morning of the 23rd.

One of the joys of traveling light – without much luggage and with no expectations – is that you can turn on a dime, and retrace your steps.

Just as we pulled into the driveway at Bayou Teche, my cell phone rang. It was Mary Lynn, our weekend hostess and social planner extraordinaire. She came straight to the point. “What are you doing tonight? Surely you don’t have plans?” “No,” I said. “We don’t have plans. We’re barely out of the car.” “Good,” she said. “Get unpacked, freshen up and be ready to leave at 4:30. You’ll follow me to the bank, and then I’ll lead you over to Lafayette – we’ll take the back way, so you miss the shopping center.”

“That sounds fine,” I said, “but we just came through Lafayette. Why are we going back?” The woman with an answer for everything had an answer. “This is the last night for Noël Acadien,” she said, “and I’ve got tickets for you.”

I’d not heard of Noël Acadien any more than I’d heard of the bonfires, but one thing I’ve learned is never to question Mary Lynn. She arrived to explain that Lafayette’s Acadian Village decorates every Christmas with a half-million Christmas lights and everyone goes to see them. She gave us a map so we could find our way home after we’d enjoyed the attraction, and a suggested itinerary for the rest of the evening: we should come back, dine at Café Des Amis and then head straight to La Pousierre, where Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys were holding court.

Galveston’s Moody Gardens may have a million lights, three pyramids and a full-sized paddle-wheeler in their holiday display, but Noël Acadien had bon temps, and they were rouler-ing.The bayou-and-swamp emphasis was everywhere, with lighted alligators, frogs, woodpeckers and pelicans – not to mention a farmer chasing a rabbit from his garden with a hoe and Santa in a pirogue pulled by a set of truly fine gators.

After an hour or so of looking, we headed back to Breaux Bridge, ready for dinner. Main street shops were staying open late; the smell of gumbo and sounds of Zydeco filled the air. Ironically, we couldn’t find anyone at Café Des Amis able to tell us what a pousse café might be, even though we assured them it was Cajun enough for the iconic Clifton Chenier to have composed a waltz about the drink some call the apex of the bartender’s art.

Chagrined by their lack of drink knowledge, our servers shared a little information about one of our best discoveries of the trip: Gâteau de Sirop, or Syrup Cake. While they wouldn’t turn loose of the actual recipe used at Café Des Amis, they agreed with what seems to be a consensus that Steen’s Syrup, and Steen’s alone, should be used in a proper cake.

Steen’s Pure Cane Syrup, first produced in Abbeville, Louisiana in 1910, is the only U.S. cane syrup still manufactured today and is recognized by Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste as an endangered regional food product. Use a different syrup and you may have a fine cake, but you’ll not have Cajun Gâteau de Sirop. (As luck would have it, in 2009 “Marcelle” managed to twist the arm of Dickie Breaux, owner of Café Des Amis, who gave up the recipe. It was published in the Times-Picayune, and as soon as I lay my hands on some Steen’s Syrup, I’ll be busy in the kitchen.)

Friday evening, as we dallied over our Gâteau de Sirop and coffee, a fellow diner mentioned we should be sure to watch for cane wagons and mills on our next day’s drive. The sugar cane harvest is winding down, but there’s still activity in the area, and a working sugar mill is hard to miss. Great, rising clouds of steam can be seen for miles, and trucks piled high with raw cane are everywhere.

This year, there are smiles, too. Kenneth Gravois, a sugar-cane specialist with the LSU AgCenter says while the total tonnage of cane harvested per acre will be somewhat average, weather conditions combined to produce a high-quality crop. He estimates an increase to 230 pounds of sugar per ton of cane in 2011, compared with last year’s production of 226 pounds per ton.

Just as we were finishing our second cup of coffee, Mary Lynn breezed in and proceeded to give us a tutorial in Zydeco Breakfast 101. The staff already was moving back tables to create a dance floor – in only hours, Café Des Amis would be filled again with patrons, eating, dancing and celebrating life in a weekly ritual that pulls folks from Houston and New Orleans just for the pleasure of it all.

As we left the café, Mary Lynn made sure we understood the cardinal rules – Be there very early, start with beignets and don’t order until the music starts so you can keep your table! - and then left us to our own devices.

Not quite willing to take on La Poussiere at such a late hour, we headed home, and burst into giggles when we found our first gift from Tee Jules’ Cajun Twelve Days of Christmas. True, it wasn’t snuggled into a fig tree, but there it was – a crawfish in a Christmas tree.

Little did we know the next day would bring shrimp, poule d’eau , cypress knees, Fleurs de lis, oysters and crabs, a clue to a marvelous pirogue story (if not the paddles), a few decorative duck decoys and some (presumed) shotgun shells in the back of a hunter’s truck.

And we still hadn’t gotten to the bonfires.

(to be continued…)

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I love cookies as much as the next person, but my sympathies are all with the woman.  While it’s true this year’s preparations have been less time-consuming than usual because of my mother’s death some months ago, I still find myself pulling trays from the oven or standing at the post office thinking, I could stand some peace and quiet.

Especially, some quiet. The pressures of the Christmas to-do list are one thing, but this season reverberates with noise to the point of distraction. Hearing the Chipmunks’ version of Jingle Bell Rock piped through the produce aisle is more annoying than festive, and the irony of Silent Night drowning out conversation speaks for itself.  While carols and seasonal songs blare away, children nag, parents fuss and impatient drivers fill shopping mall parking lots with the honking of a thousand demented geese.

Even at night, hours meant for sleep are disturbed by the ebb and flow of incessant, internal questioning. What have I forgotten? Who will be offended? Can we afford it?  Will there be time?   It’s little wonder by Christmas Day many are ready to throw out the tree with the wrapping paper and get on with it. Twelve days of Christmas? Stretching on to the Feast of the Epiphany? It seems a horror. Who needs more Christmas when we already are exhausted and drained?

Seasonal excess can be an easy target for the Scrooges of the world. Still, most people consider their Christmas pleasures – gathering with family and friends, experiencing the beauty of worship and enjoying the exchange of gifts – to be well worth the time and energy they require. What is rarely considered – by believer or cynic alike – is that we prepare in the context of a world far older than our customs, more expansive than our plans. The world in which we celebrate Christmas turns on an ageless axis, with no regard for human intent and purpose. It is a hidden world, though imperfectly so. It can be searched out and surprised, and it reveals itself in unexpected ways.

I experienced that hidden world some years ago, while on holiday in England. After a stopover in London I traveled on to Wiltshire, intending to celebrate Christmas at Salisbury Cathedral. Arriving without reservations, I discovered a wonderful inn where I came to enjoy long conversations with the innkeeper and his wife. They were cheerful sorts, bubbly and accomodating, just as keepers of inns should be. Best of all, they were full of practical advice for making my English sojourn perfect.

When they discovered I hadn’t planned to make the trek to Stonehenge (“that pile of rocks in a pasture” as another guest put it), they were aghast. “But you must go to Stonehenge!”, they implored. Laughing, I asked if the site wasn’t better visited in summer. Giving me a look that seemed to translate, “Now see what this poor, benighted American is saying”, they agreed summer solstice celebrations are more publicized, but added that the winter solstice has its own good qualities. “For one thing,” they said with only a hint of a smile, “in the dead of winter there are far fewer tourists to clog up the roads.”

With the promise of an unclogged road to lure me on, I agreed to make the trip with them. As we traveled and chatted, they unraveled strands of solstice lore. I knew some basics – for example, that the winter solstice marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year, and that the sun descends on that day to its lowest point in the sky.

What I didn’t know was that the sun’s noontime elevation appears to be the same for several days before and after the event. The word solstice itself comes from the Latin solstitium, which combines “sun” (sol) and “a stoppage” (stitium). According to legend, at the moment of solstice it is not only the sun that stops. If you are in a silent place, with a quiet mind and stilled heart, you may hear the earth pause and catch her breath as she waits for the sun to turn and move, beginning his ageless journey toward the spring.

Charmed by the legend and intrigued by the science, I became increasingly eager to explore the “pile of rocks in a pasture”. When we arrived at Stonehenge, on the day after the solstice, what crowds had gathered were gone. There were no ticket-takers, no vendors, no guides. There was only a strange and forlorn emptiness: a cold sun shining through high, thin clouds,  a tumble of implacable cold gray rock and winter-singed grass dusted with snow. Around the circled rock a cold wind sighed, rocking a single bird circling high above the plain.

Moving toward the stones, I found the silence so complete I could hear my heart’s blood beating in my ears. A sense of presence, profound and palpable, gripped my heart. Anxious, no longer certain of my solitude, I turned as if to confront an assailant. There was no one. There were only the rocks, the sky and a hush of wind, singing across Salisbury plain.

Each year as the darkness deepens, as days grow shorter and the sun hastens his journey toward the solstice turn, I remember Salisbury Plain – the stones, the silence and the song. My first experience of that deep and richly textured silence was not to be my last. Blessedly, such experiences depend neither upon the stones of an ancient culture nor the shades of a people lost in time. A sense of presence, an experience of deep connection to the larger world in which we live seems intrinsic to life itself. It comes to us as birthright, although there is no predicting how or where it will appear.

Wherever the mystery of connectedness surprises us – in a snowstorm-emptied New York street or a grove of mist-shrouded Redwoods, at a baby’s crib or a parent’s grave, in an empty classroom or an overflowing church, near a dawn-touched shoreline or in the fading shadows of a suburban yard, its nature is unmistakable, and the poet’s words apply:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

T.S. Eliot ~ Little Gidding

There will be no Stonehenge in my travels this year, no moment of wonder in the emptiness of a windswept English plain. But still the sun lowers and still comes the pause, and once again Solstice has arrived. If we are wise, we will find a bit of space, a little emptiness, some moments of silence in the midst of our celebrations to embrace its coming and its promise.

If we dare to stop – preparing for ourselves a room built of those moments of solitude and silent attentiveness that so often elude us – then as surely as the sun stops, and the earth breathes, and the wind sings silence over the cold-singed plain, we may yet discover that same vertiginous joy.

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