Crawfish holes, church keys, making the groceries...and other South Louisiana Anomalies

Just a few things that make South Louisiana Home....

The Mississippi River is in our "Front Yard" so to speak. The levee is across the street, then a bar pit, then woods for approximately half a mile and then you get to the Mississippi. Fortunately it's been flooded for the last month, so our 'neighborhood' (Plaquemine Point) has basically had a new pond to putter around in for the last few weeks.

Shelly went and bought us a canoe a couple of weeks ago and that Friday afternoon we dragged the canoe up to the top of the levee and pushed it into the flooded Mississippi waters. We shouldn't have been surprised to see all of our neighbors down there too, but I guess we were a little surprised. People sitting and fishing from the gravel roads that usually lead to trails going down into the woods. Lots of people with trot lines (Mark LeBlanc, Shelly's brother-in-law took us to run a few lines with he and his eldest daughter, Madeline), tooling around in pirogues and in general just enjoying the entertainment provided by an event that happens once every 10 years or so.

These are all pictures and video taken from the last couple of weekends in the waters of the flooded Mississippi, which crested yesterday at 43 feet.

Okay, so the floating ants have a little story I should relate. I'm not sure how many people out there realize that when fire ants are flooded out, they do not die. Basically they get 'washed up' and then have to cling together, or to pieces of flotsam in order to stay alive. They may all eventually find a tree branch to cling onto, or they may just float along in the water. The Saturday we took the canoe out with Shelly's youngest sister Jennifer and her boyfriend, Brian we had our own little ant adventure. Brian, who had never seen such a thing broke a twig off of a tree to more closely examine the 'Ant clumping' phenomenon. Then he looked over at me and Shelly as we were explaining what it was. Brian then cranked his arm back as though he were going to throw said "ant bomb" at us. We stared at him in shock (no way he's going to do this) and even said, "please, really, don't do that!" Did I mention we were in a canoe in about 15 foot of FUNKY water in the middle of the woods with no way to escape? So, Brian does in fact hurl the twig avec fire ants at us, which I totally expected to soar over or land in front of our canoe, but which in fact landed square in the middle of the canoe. Only after our frantic scramblings and cries of "WHAT THE HELL DUDE?" did Brian finally realize he may have done something inappropriate. Sheesh. Some people's children, ya know?

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the pictures and the brief video clips....this is our front yard.