Photographing a bayou is mostly about how early in the morning you’re willing to wake up. The camera is the easy part.

Catahoula Lake is filling up with silt. The small lake in St. Martin Parish is now so shallow in places that grassy mounds can be seen poking up through the surface of the water throughout the year, and it’s hard to get a boat across the belly of the lake without your motor grinding mud. The good news is that a parish public works project aimed at restoring depth to the lake is currently underway.

A term paper presented to Dr. Benjamin Kaplan, Southeastern Louisiana Institute, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for credit in Sociology 371G—Marie D. Eastin—May, 1960

The state wildflower of Louisiana is officially the Louisiana iris, and who, having seen her purple petals in person, would deny her her celebrity status? Some even trace the roots of the fleur-de-lis symbol, so central to Louisiana’s mythology, back to a wild iris, fittingly, and not a lily. And the spectrum of her petals befits her grandeur, too: purple, purple-red, purple-black, purple-blue. Horticulturists create hybrids in her honor. But this is a story about another Louisiana wildflower. She isn’t an official anything. She’s basically a weed.

Three small wild persimmons still attached to the same fallen branch crown a rowdy pile of bigger fallen branches. I strike a match. The bed of brittle cypress leaves lying feathered at the bottom of the pile sparkles and sends up sparks.

Pecan cake is probably my favorite way to enjoy pecans. I’ll take a slice of pecan cake over a piece of pecan pie any day of the week.

At the cottage I’m surrounded by trees and plants. My dad has kept a garden—usually several gardens at any given time—for as long as I can remember, and my mom has always made sure that the patio area and outdoor spaces were alive with flowers and ferns and interesting ivies and vines.