All the ladies in the darkened cinderblock room became ovulating crucifixes when Don took the microphone, pulled off his Sunday-white ballcap and placed it reverently on a speaker the size of a Frigidaire. With arms outstretched, nailed to the air with cigarettes and beer bottles, they all sought the first man who’d look ’em in the eyes, even the wormy cusses with two left feet.

When the karaoke machine’s familiar…

Fully aware that brochures are chiseled by men and not by immaculate inscription, Cecil and I drove Hwy. 31 through St. Martinville last week in search of “the most photographed tree in the world.” Having already composed a title for the tale I wanted to write, I was hell-bent on walking where Longfellow hadn’t.

The symbolism is what mattered, never mind that the tree was actually the…

Swollen with a 40-year-old New Englander’s fertile imaginings and written to satiate his drive to mimic Homer’s meter, “Evangeline” began as a protracted and historical love story based on a third-hand anecdote from a land as foreign to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as Merle Norman is to the Taliban.

The poet-professor never set foot in Louisiana, let alone Acadiana. He never saw crawfish mounds or cypress knees jutting…

Even with her gap-toothed, tobacco-stained smile, the old pop-eyed Buick Limited made my heart swoon. Although time and the elements had not been kind to the former queen of General Motors’ “affordable” eight-passenger coaches (meaning $2,360, which was about 50 cents a pound), I was smitten.…

The Cadillac of Steaks!

Cecil steered his little…

There are no flowers, real or faded plastic, within the small untended graveyard off Louisiana's Hwy. 135…

Bobby Petrus, blue eyes grinning like he’d just painted a mustache on the Mona Lisa, was barely able to speak around a mouthful of adrenaline.

“Dang boys, I’m still shaking,” he finally managed, offering up his wobbly skinned-up wrist as proof…

Another visit to the land of the ghost trees and I am haunted by their beauty.

Spanish moss waves carelessly in the wind, at dusk it whispers of derelict sails of long sunken pirate ships.

In Louisiana it sings the song of the South, of all the grandeur of plantations lost and enslaved men freed, of constant battles won and lost with Nature and the tribes of Men.

Surviving only on air and water these beautiful strands of white and mint green…