Tout les temps en temps (“Every now and then”) — about once every ten years here in South Louisiana — we’re all reminded of a fact that is otherwise easy to forget or ignore: a hurricane passes, the electricity goes…
“Dans ce temps-ça, ils onviont pas beaucoup des affaires à faire d’autre chose que s’assir et conter des contes.” (“In those days, they didn’t have many things to do besides sit down and tell stories.”) Between the time that…
I was listening to the radio the other day, an old program from the 1960s hosted by the late Dudley LeBlanc: “Les Nouvelles de la Semaine” (“The News of the Week”). Among a certain generation of Louisianians, “Cousin Dud,” state…
There’s an old saying in Louisiana, which goes: “Février est pas bâtard,” meaning (very) roughly “February isn’t half-hearted.” If that’s only a little less clear than troubled water, there’s another expression, quite similar, said still in France: “L’hiver est pas…
While the Louisiana winter is a sometimes pleasant, sometimes harsh reminder that we are indeed a part of the North American continent, and while, culturally, we do share many historical connections with our French cousins far to the north, as…
In the sometimes petty, but often heated, squabbles that plague Louisiana’s cultural landscape, the culinary domain is often hotly contested territory. Most of these disagreements arise ultimately from the very thing that makes French Louisiana unique: the diversity of the…
In the north of Old France, in Normandy, Picardy, and Wallonia, there is an expression that many old country dwellers still use even today: instead of speaking of faire récolte [harvesting crops], to describe this culmination of the year’s work,…