Memories of the Old Woodframe House With a Tin Roof

Since I work in Lafayette now and have a 40 minute commute, I went to the Lafayette Public Library and got a library card.  I've found that my sanity is best preserved by not listening to talk radio or the news.  My discovery of audiobooks has made my commuting much more enjoyable and have even found that I'll sit in the parking lot at work or in the driveway at home waiting for a good "stopping point" to turn off the novel du jour.  I'll alternate between Ernest Hemingway, John Grisham, Michael Connelly, James Patterson, and James Lee Burke.

If you've never read James Lee Burke, I highly recommend him to you.  He is from New Iberia, Louisiana and writes in his Dave Robichaux novels so descriptively that you can smell the ozone in the coming thunderstorm as you watch the raindrops beginning to dimple the muddy waters of Bayou Teche.  He can put you right there, feeling the blades of St. Augustine grass between your barefoot toes.

Today in the story, Dave Robichaux and his sidekick Clete Purcel were driving down the Breaux Bridge Highway and he was describing the simple, square woodframe houses with tin roofs that cajuns lived in and it brought me back in time.  At our farm, we had a wood frame house that we called 'the camp' that was exactly as Burke described.  I have no photo of the camp as it was long since torn down.  The photo below is the closest I could find on the Internet.

Image Credit

The camp had occupied a spot at the farm for as long as I could remember.  It was up on piers and that provided a shady, cool spot for random farm dogs and the occasional coon, possum, or armadillo to sit under on those dog days of summer.  It had a porch on the front and a porch on the back.  After long days laboring in the rice field, the front porch was a comfortable spot to sit and let your legs dangle off the side of the porch and enjoy a cold Dr. Pepper.  You could look across and see the oil shed where someone had shot a big pattern of buck shot into the sliding door.

The back porch had a view of the pond whose levee was constantly under assault by encroaching 'chicken trees' (Chinese tallow trees).  We would chop them down and they would grow right back with a vengeance.  The pond was stocked with catfish, but was full of turtles, too.  One day I was fishing with a Zebco reel when a thunderstorm chased me back inside the camp.  I listened to thr roar of rain on the hot tin roof of the camp.  When the storm passed and the sun came back out, creating steam on the tin roof and nearby blacktop road, I ran back out to the pond and reeled in the skeleton of a 10 inch long catfish.  A turtle had cleaned the catfish that had taken my bait during the storm like you would expect a piranha would.

The back porch had a distinguishing characteristic that probably wouldn't be a selling point to most prospective home buyers.  Right above the back steps nailed to the rafters, were the two front feet of a raccoon that had been butchered there.  The coon feet were full of cobwebs.  His feet were nailed to hold the carcass while the animal was skinned and remained as a macabre monument of sorts.

The camp was furnished very modestly.  There was a TV where we would watch the news or read the Delta Farm Press while we microwaved a simple lunch, being careful to keep utensils stored in the fridge since we shared tenancy at the camp with field mice.  There was a window unit that kept things cool, but you had to talk a little loud to hear over the rumble of the air conditioner.  The wood floors had a few holes in them where you could see through to the dirt below and a portion of the floor was charred black where a space heater had almost burned the place down. 

I can still remember a long table that ran along the wall in the kitchen.  There was a white tin container with a tight fitting lid that was rough with rust.  My grandmother and great-grandmother kept the container full of homemade oatmeal cookies to satisfy the working mens' sweet tooths. I remember sitting at that table after running in from being stung by a wasp.  Joe Fontenot, a man who worked for my Dad & Grandpa, administered a healing salve to my wasp sting made by spitting out a nasty wad of Levi Garrett chewing tobacco mixed with Five Brothers Pipe tobacco and placing the wet mess on my arm.  The stinging sensation was almost immediately gone! 

On the south side of the camp was a spot where no grass grew.  That's where we mixed up Treflan and Sencor and other chemicals in our chemical rig to spray on our soybeans.  There was a 'turtle back' hill of dirt in that spot as that was the location that we used to pressure wash the tractors, combines and plows before putting them up.  Years of washing mud off implements on that spot had made a hill of topsoil there.

The old woodframe house with a tin roof on the farm has long since been torn down.  Sometimes I can't even remember my own telephone number, but the childhood memories of a simple boy living in a simpler time from forty or so years ago lives on in my mind in vivid, accurate detail.  Funny how that works.