It’s a Fam-ly, Tradition.

It’s official:  I’m from the country.

Though I’ve traveled many miles since my former years and have evolved from the little country girl named Jenny from Arcadia, North Louisiana will always hold my roots.

As a child I played many hours alone and with my cousins in our family’s never-ending expanse of land, ponds and trees.  I lived for many years in my imagination creating elaborate tales about the lives that go with the abandoned structures that once filled our small town of 2000 people right outside of the “big city” of Shreveport.  Yes, Arcadia, the town where Bonnie and Clyde were killed and the Possum Festival once thrived.  (Yeah- this is really where I grew up.) The town is an iconic deep south small town including all the main components:  the bank, the baptist church in the center of town, the hardware store that my Uncle owns, front porches, green grass, old trees, and families that have known each other since the dawn of the 20th century.  Working class timber men, cattle ranchers, and oil and gas men ran this town smack dab in the middle of Mississippi and Texas for decades.  Though boredom reigned for me as a child as I lived in a world that seemed to have passed long before I came, it taught me a couple of very important things:

to have faith and to dream.

This weekend was the Davidson family Reunion in Athens, Louisiana- a town that hit its prime in the 60s; a true gem of a find.  My sister and I left our Mother’s place in Monroe on Saturday morning to traverse over the very green spring countryside to capture some of North Louisiana’s unique beauty.  A setting that once seemed like a dead world to me, suddenly became full of life.  I could not wrap my heart around all the history and life that these small towns still hold.  There is something pretty incredible about seeing where your grandparents parents once lived and knowing their story and then seeing your story anew because of their story.  There is such a sense of wholeness that comes with knowing where you came from– even if it doesn’t fully align with who you are today.

You know, God does work in mysterious ways.  He didn’t transform that world for me as I had hoped He would: He just transformed me.  How appropriate for Easter. (Amen.)

(Crimson and Clover– not just a song. Its what grows naturally on the sides of the highway in N. Lala land.)

(My Poppop’s Gas station in Downtown Arcadia was broken into by either a Chef or a HS Graduate.)

(The inside of my Poppop’s truck.)

(The church next to my pre-school.)

(Mini Lobsters for supper– only the best…!)

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 12:42 am and is filed under + Luce, Pregnancy, Families, Kids, & Pets and tagged with Arcadia, Athens, Davidson Family, Easter, Monroe, North Louisiana, Old Buildings, Reunion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.