The Sane Asylum Nature Series

"Sail on!" it says, "sail on, ye stately ships!
  And with your floating bridge the ocean span;
Be mine to guard this light from all eclipse,
  Be yours to bring man nearer unto man

H W Longfellow
The Lighthouse at St. Augustine 

From the Road...I was told to take highway 13 out of Eunice and go about nine miles until I get to Bayou Portage and I would see a Creole house with a porch painted bright yellow. Could not miss it. They were correct...it was right where it was supposed to be.

I knocked on the front door screen, but a voice from inside told me to, "Go around back." I entered through the back door as most folks do in this part of Acadiana.

She greeted me from her small wooded kitchen table. The room was full of straight back chairs and one rocker next to the cooking fireplace. She asked me, "Are you one of them Yankees from up North?" I told her I was from North Louisiana. She said, "Yep, you are a Yankee." After a laugh or two she confessed that she would not hold that against me.

She was one of those exotic creatures that feels so comfortable in their skins that it some how   makes you feel a little less than ordinary. She was a kind soul. Her long gray hair was pulled back and tied with a purple cotton scarf. Around her neck and ankles were dimes tied together with a knotted string. She wore a handmade Jobs Tear Rosary around her wrist. Her hands, showing a well lived life, rested on what looked like thirty or forty pages of hand written French verse. She noticed my curiosity and said, "This is my third great grandfather's Saint Suaire. He wrote these prayers in 1755 during the Grand Derangement in Nova Scotia. He called it his Holy Bier."

I asked if the prayers had any special powers? She begin to explain that each prayer contained a healing power for different ailments and if you carry the Holy Bier with you at all times, it will let you know three days before you die. She seemed quiet content about knowing that fate.

She said, "You keep looking at my dimes." I told her they did peek my curiosity. "Well," she said, they are to protect me from Gris-Gris or evil spell. I don't practice Vodur, but I just like to be on the safe side."

She insisted we have second breakfast as they call it in these parts. It consisted of Tasso and Red Boudin, all the while giving me a lesson on the difference between Vodur and Traiteur. While they are both folk beliefs, Traiteurs are considered faith healers and the special powers are passed from one generation to the other. She experienced the powers from her mother.

She related, "We do not pass spells, practice voodoo or hoodoo. We are healers."

We talked the morning away about her life and about all things that make up her beautiful world. She raised seven children with her husband of 70 years. I remember her statement about raising children. She related, "You know we don't need an instruction manual to raise our children. All you need to do is live our life and let them observe you...how to adjust to life when it hands you a bum deal is learned, you know..."

It was a great morning spent with a grand lady. As I was leaving out the back way, she asked, "Ego, if you could choose any of my prayers for healing, which one would you choose?"

What a lesson in that question...without pause, I replied, "I would choose the prayer to heal a troubled mind." She looked at me with those dark Cajun eyes asked, "If I agree to teach you that prayer, would you promise not to tell..."

Her name was Lena Chopin...Ego