This is why young people find old people so frustrating: if you’re old and still have a memory, everything you read, hear, or see reminds you of something you’ve already read, heard, or seen. Connecting dots becomes an obsession. Everything old is new again.
I was born in 1946 in Ascension Parish, Louisiana. This was sugarcane and strawberry country. Today it’s the center of Cancer Alley, the industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Ironically, it’s now the richest parish in Louisiana.
When I was growing up here, I didn’t know any rich people. We were farmers, tradesmen, store owners, or shift workers. I was reared in Brittany where families of my grandmother and two of her sisters homesteaded and farmed. Everybody in Brittany was related in some way. I was raised by a village.
Because I’m old and can connect dots from the time before civil rights created self-proclaimed refugees seeking “safe neighborhoods”, before interstate highways, before 3-hour commutes, before the gig economy, before hate media, before corrupt social media, I’ve come to see my humble village as something rare, something almost preserved in amber. A community.
I’m not nostalgic. In my opinion the only great time in America was when people were organized around caring for each other, when there was respect for something political scientists call the social contract.
This poem doesn’t have the sophisticated structure of poems my hero Greg Olear posts, but it’s meaningful to me. It was written by my mother’s beloved first cousin, Rachel Dyer. Rachel designed crossword puzzles for a newspaper syndicate. My mother was enrolled in a correspondence art school. They were some of the “creatives” of Brittany. Rachel died of TB in 1940. So did two of her sisters. Times were tough in Brittany.
Thanks for posting this, Sharon.
All very well said. Thank you.