Except for three years of my life, I have lived either in Illinois or Minnesota, and those three fantastically exceptional years I spent on Bayou Lafourche in southern Louisiana.
My first job out of college was teaching jr. high orchestra and private string lessons on the bayou. Bayou Lafourche is located south of New Orleans and just north of the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing in my entire life had prepared me for living on the bayou with the Cajuns.
The Cajuns are of French Canadian descent and live along the bayous of southern Louisiana. While I lived there, I experienced them as having close knit relationships with friends and families, and living with a joie de vivre in all they did. During my stay there, I heard many of the Cajuns refer to themselves as “coonass.”
Fast forward a few decades: I’m in Minnesota and while searching for people to follow on Twitter, I ran across the Twitter account “coonassdotcom.” This belonged to Jill Guidry on Bayou Lafourche, my old stomping grounds! Jill and I connected and I am pleased to introduce her to you as a guest blogger. Jill’s love and passion for all things Cajun and the Louisiana coastline come through in her writing. Jill has also shared her talent as a photographer with Talk2theAnimals by providing pictures of Pelican and Great Blue Heron for Talk2theAnimals Animal Communication Practice Fridays. You can connect with Jill at her blog Bayou Child – One Cajun’s Life and on Twitter.
Hello, I’m Jill Guidry and Janet was kind enough to tell y’all about my blog and feature one of the many animals that live here in her Friday practice session. I was honored to see that she introduced you to Pelican. Pelican got a powerful spirit and very much a part of life here in Southern Louisiana. This part of the world is full of hundreds of different animals: gators, nutria, otters, raccoons deer possums, naming only a few of them. We got hundreds of species of birds here: some live here year round and some return here every year to survive.
Our beloved coastland is being eaten away by damage from hurricanes, but mostly from coastal erosion. We are losing our bayous and losing Louisiana. Experts say an area the size of a football field disappears hourly. When it goes, a unique culture and ecosystem will be lost forever. I’m working, along with others, to stop this from happening. I have lived out here on the bayou my whole life and my spirit is part of this place. I would rather die with it then live without it. The voices of the animals, birds and insects here can be heard like nowhere else in the world. I thank Janet for this chance to speak for my place and for the Cajun people. I think sometimes animals make their message known better then people ever could, and I want everything that live here to know I’m listening and if it’s in my power I will never let their voices drown.
In order to live in a place like this we got to live with the animals, not against them, but we do hunt some of them. Some of them hunt us. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else and I invite you to learn more about the animals here. Some of them exist nowhere else, they are priceless treasures that we can’t afford to lose.
Jill, thank you so much for sharing your love of the bayou with all of us at Talk2theAnimals!
Harmony,
Janet Roper
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