Reflections on the Teche

The satsuma tree in our backyard is still full of bright orange citrus fruit.  We started harvesting in late September and here it is the first of January.   

I live in a world of abundance.  Cleaning out a closet on New Year’s Day, I found an abundance of Christmas tins.  I thought about keeping them but realized that I was not going to suddenly begin baking for Christmas gifts, so I put them in a box for Goodwill.  My mother-in-law informed me that she always gives them back to the giver.  I don’t remember from whence they all came.  I guess I’ll start that practice next year.

Living on the Bayou Teche, I enjoy an abundance of nature just outside my back door.  I have seen an eagle, a pelican, and commonly a blue heron fly across the bayou.  I am lucky or blessed, whichever way you look at it.  I wish, however, for more.  Don’t we all?  I don’t wish for more Christmas tins, but I do wish for more time.  Longing is a part of life.  It keeps us hoping for the future.  It keeps us making resolutions.  My 2011 resolution is to write more.  I thought what better way to make myself do it than to have a blog.  So here I am putting words on the Internet and hoping others will want to read them.

I have been inspired by my abundance to share.  And I hope that in some small way that I may inspire others, too. 

In the fall of 2008, I had a poem published in the Aurorean.  I reprint it here as it speaks to nature’s abundance and human longing.

Nature’s No Fool

Nature never fools around with just being decorative.
                                                                                                         –Alice Munro

She remembers the woman in the movie who put her hand
into the yellow petal of the skunk lily to feel its heat.
It is the heat that attracts the insects, she said.
Heat attracts,
or perhaps it is the stench.  Animal instincts
cross the boundaries
of good behavior.

Today, she watches as the bumblebee lights
on her t-shirt, sniffing at the yellow,
disturbing her writing space.
Oblivious,
he primps his antennae, then flies
away disappearing into the breeze.

In fall, she picks the satsumas–
bright orange ornaments so heavy
they crack the tree’s core. She peels
loose flesh to taste the sweet gift.

Nature never fools
around.  Nature knows what it knows.
And sometimes
when the stars fill the sky
she wishes to be one with the knowing.
She will lie on her back and wait
for the waking.

Satsumas are a citrus fruit grown in South Louisiana.  The fruit ripens in the fall with the first report card and tastes somewhat like a tangerine, only better.