*I am getting close to my home. Sabine Parish that sits sandwiched between the Louisiana and Texas state line. The Parish where I learned to love and learn and cherish and understand freedom.***
It’s morning in Louisiana. I’m driving. I tend to ramble when I’m driving, especially in this part of the world. Parish Road 21 takes me through green. Green everywhere. Large live oaks that have stories to tell. Rusty tin barns. Corn fields with perfect rows, that disappear into the green of the forest.
American flags are hanging from most mailboxes, horse trailers, workshops, treehouses, and semi-truck garages. Wet clothes hanging on a fence. An ole dog laying in the shade.
There are plenty of curves ahead, winding through the landscape. They take me past Faith Chapel Church, Providence Primitive Baptist Church, New Chapel Baptist, First Assembly of God, and a heap of other three-room meeting houses with well-kept cemeteries. And behind the cemetery’s, more green fields, and behind the green fields, cows and beyond the cows, the green of pine forest.
There’s the Perry Antique Store—which used to be a gas station one hundred years ago. It sits on approximately thirteen million acres of flat earth. Old men sit on its porch, chewing the fat. Watching traffic.
There are ancient mobile homes with brand new Fords parked out front. There are brand new mobile homes with ancient Fords. I pass red-dirt-road offshoots that lead to God-Knows-Where. Horses in front yards. Cattle in backyards. Weathered brick chimneys, standing in empty fields. Telephone poles with fading signs that read: “Elect Edwards for governor, for a brighter Louisiana.”
I pass small towns, small communities. Ebarb, Piney Shores, Zwolle. Converse is about as big as a minute, but they have a nice baseball field. Baseball is serious business in Converse.
I pass bumpy creek bridges—I have to slow down to drive across. There’s a crumbling red house covered in green vines—probably older than the late great Kathryn Tucker Windham. Bass boats sit by the highway with for-sale signs. Farm-implement graveyards stretch clear to China.
There is a man, burning trash in his front lawn. There are manmade bass and bream ponds. Overgrown yards with rusty swing sets and children’s playhouses, with wood rot. Rusty mailboxes with flags...I’m getting close to home..
Today we will talk about independence, freedoms, melting pots, mending fences, family...some arrived on different oceans, on smaller boats, from different ports, to a place where nobody wanted them. Years latter, their children are physicians, shrimpers, grocery store clerks, farmers and all that is in between. It is possible, if you want it.
As Americans, we export and inspire a notion of freedom and openness, the dream that we sell as a promise. Sometimes, we make a mess of it. We forget what it is we are dreaming, and what we are selling as an ideal. It's all still an experiment, but we need to do better. I think we will. I have that hope. That's what is on my mind today... Doc
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