Reflections

In with the New

2010-09-01T14:27:00.000-07:00

Facebook is a strange and extraordinary thing, isn’t it? As I write my Reflections column—the last puzzle piece required before we can ship our magazine's September Performing Arts issue off to the printer—it’s a Friday afternoon that has so far been long on rain and short on inspiration. So, having spent half an hour gazing at a blank computer screen without having any original ideas, I’ve just flipped over to Country Roads’ Facebook page and broadcast my dilemma to the world (or to the couple of thousand discerning Facebookers who have chosen to follow Country Roads magazine’s Facebook page, anyway). And here we are ten minutes later, with a handful of potential column topics large enough to make it likely that I will spend the rest of the afternoon messing around on Facebook rather than writing anything to fill this space. Based on responses, there seems to be a consensus that the world would be a better place for the addition of more bike lanes. Especially Louisiana. It’s mostly flat, after all, and more than one of you noted the irony that the Highway 61 widening project through West Feliciana Parish—arguably the finest cycling country in the state—has proceeded without any bike lanes to keep the thousands of cyclists who come here to ride out of the traffic flow. I’m a keen cyclist myself, so this was an easy point of view to identify with. But even if I wasn’t disposed towards spending my leisure time on a bike, I like to think I’d be supportive of the idea that any brand new, federally funded road construction ought to accommodate a cheap, non-polluting, healthy, alternative mode of transportation into its infrastructure. If there was such a thing, it would be possible to connect West Feliciana’s excellent school campus with its equally impressive sports park complex, without kids’ parents needing to contribute to the traffic congestion along the stretch of Highway 61 between the two. I remember once seeing a cartoon of a bunch of people in workout clothes, standing waiting for an elevator. Next to the elevator is a staircase, and on the wall between the two is a sign that reads “Stairmaster Classes—Second Floor.” To me, driving schoolkids one mile so they can go to a sports park seems to fall into the same category. Is it too late, I wonder?

While we’re on the subject of cycling, I’d like to note that, after half a lifetime spent enduring my fanaticism on the subject of bikes, my wife has finally broken down and joined me in the saddle. For her recent birthday she received a new road bike (and even had the grace to feign excitement about it). Since then we’ve tackled various St. Francisville-area byways, and despite having developed a healthy antipathy to a l/2-mile-long hill on Highway 421, Ashley’s taking to it like the proverbial duck to water. That said, our most enthusiastically received ride to date took place not in St. Francisville, but on the Northshore, on the marvelous Tammany Trace. Thousands make use of the Tammany Trace but for anyone new to it, or new to cycling, it is a superbly maintained, very safe, rails-to-trails conversion that connects Covington, Abita Springs, Mandeville, Lacombe and Slidell with thirty-one miles of smooth, flat asphalt trail open to any form of engineless transport. We trundled through downtown Covington, rubbernecked at Abita Springs’ pretty houses, considered stopping at the Abita Brew Pub (but sensibly decided not to, it being 10 am), and ultimately arrived at the bustling Trailhead—complete with farmer’s market—on the Lakefront in old Mandeville an hour later. Along the way we rode slow, spotted birds, heard crickets, waved to flocks of other riders, and genuinely saw a side of the Louisiana summertime that, from inside an air-conditioned car, somehow remains invisible. It was, quite simply, a perfect reintroduction to the simple pleasures of a bike ride. To roll down the Trace is to fall in love with cycling all over again. How nice to have someone special to share it with.

Ah, Facebook. I’ve got to admit to having something of a love/hate relationship with it. Call me old-fashioned, but there’s still something I find unnerving about the window Facebook opens into one’s life—and then how seductively it invites us to fill that window with personal information. But then again, the interactive conversation that Facebook facilitates brings so much to the journalistic endeavor. Writing an article becomes a far more interesting—and worthwhile—undertaking when the people who read it can talk back to you. It’s the difference between a journey taken alone, or experienced with a friend. Kind of like a bike ride on a summer Saturday morning, company makes the experience richer.

Meet the Neighbors

2010-08-01T14:25:00.000-07:00

When I first came to live in rural Louisiana, it took awhile to adjust my understanding as to who should properly be described as a “neighbor.” We live at the end of a road ten miles from the nearest place you can buy milk, in a part of West Feliciana parish where describing the population density as “sparse” would be a bit like describing winter in Antarctica as “chilly.” For the most part, there’s a fair bit of space that separates us from those that live in the vicinity so when, in the early years, my wife would say “James; come and meet our neighbor Mister So-and-So,” my first impulse was to look wildly around for the house next door that I’d somehow failed to notice. I moved from an environment that was mostly urban, so for me neighbors were the people with whom you shared a fence if you were lucky, or a wall or possibly a bathroom if you were less lucky, and it took me awhile to adjust to the the idea that a neighbor could be someone who lives fourteen miles away by road. But after having lived out here for fifteen years, it’s all started to make sense. We humans are social creatures first, so in the absence of any near neighbors, we’ll just expand the geographic boundaries of what we consider “neighborhood” until it involves enough people to fill up a dinner table, or ensure there’s someone we can borrow a cup of sugar or a ladder from, or call when we get our tractor stuck in the creek.

Read the Rest

Organic Farming, with WWOOFers

2010-07-01T14:23:00.000-07:00

There comes a point after, oh, fifteen years of editing a monthly magazine, when it’s easy to convince yourself that you’ve developed at least a passing acquaintance with most of the words in the English language. Once you’ve found excuses to work words like ‘obeophone,’ ‘cacodemomania,’ and ‘prestidigitation’ into the things that you publish, you develop a conceit that you’re not leaving many linguistic stones unturned. So it was with interest that I learned a new word last week. It’s an acronym, can be used as a noun and a verb and, although a relatively new addition to our landscape of language, it relates to an activity as old as human civilization itself.

It’s WWOOF.

Read the Rest

Pizza Oven Resurrection

2010-06-08T08:29:00.000-07:00

A culinary obsession, baked at one thousand degrees.

Pizza hails from Italy, of course—one of early Europe's most sophisticated cultures. So it strikes me as ironic that there are still places in twenty-first-century America where you can’t get one delivered. My wife and I live in one of those places, which might explain why, after a culinarily inspiring trip to Sicily in the late ‘nineties, we devoted the best part of six months to the construction of a wood-burning brick oven, in an attempt to bring pizza-shaped deliverance to our backyard.

Read the Rest

A Lifetime in the Saddle

2010-06-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

Talking with my father on the phone recently, I listened with sympathy while he recounted having been pulled over by the Victoria police for failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. Apparently Dad had slowed to a crawl and, seeing the road was clear in both directions, he trundled into the intersection, only to be pounced upon by a zealous patrolman and directed to the shoulder. Now, based on my observations of road-rule enforcement in this part of the world, such an infraction, if it garnered any attention at all, might possibly earn you a good-natured warning. Especially if you were, say, a silver-haired retired family doctor behind the wheel of a twenty-something-year-old Jaguar. But in Dad’s case, by the time he was allowed to go on his way, he was the not-very-proud owner of six driver demerit points, and owed the Victoria Police around six hundred bucks. Admittedly things wouldn’t have been so bad if the gimlet-eyed officer hadn’t noted the absence of a seatbelt—Dad having forgotten to buckle his. But his experience reminded me that the rose-tinted glasses through which I recall my Australian youth, tend to obscure certain things from the picture. Like the displeasure and expense that accompanies most law-abiding Australians’ encounters with traffic cops.

Book Club Widow

2010-06-07T11:59:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure that the phrase “When the cat’s away the mice will play” is quite right to apply to this topic, but it’s the only one I can think of to describe the landscape at our house the first Wednesday of each month. That’s the evening when our children run amok, dress as wild animals, chase chickens, frolic in mud puddles, bathe in the pool, eat nutritionally precarious meals, and generally behave as if they’ve been raised by wolves. Why? Because on the first Wednesday of every month their mother briefly abandons the family in favor of a cerebral combination of wine, women, and words, and I become, temporarily at least, a Book Club Widow.

Proof is in the Poulet

2010-03-15T12:19:00.000-07:00

In the March issue of Country Roads, I offered some thoughts about sustainable agriculture and eating local that had come to mind after meeting Adam Aucoin and Cassy Kelly, a young couple who have moved to St. Francisville to offer locally-raised, pastured chicken to folks keen to try an alternative to eating industrially-raised poultry. Last week, having learned that the couple's first batch of several hundred chickens was now ready for the table, I got hold of a plump, whole hen, and brought it home keen to test it out for Sunday dinner.

Meet the Chicken Man

2010-03-01T09:30:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday night Ashley and I were invited to come around to a neighbor’s house for a bowl of chicken soup that could be described as inspirational. Nothing odd about the soup being spectacular: our neighbor Susan is a marvelous, instinctual cook whose food is always unforgettable. But this was a Sunday night and, like lots of people with small kids and big commutes, we have learned the hard way that going out on Sunday night tends to have a deleterious effect on Monday morning. Somewhere during the parenting journey we’ve learned the importance of balancing the pleasures of Sunday night socializing with the stigma of being the kinds of people who drop their half-asleep kids to school with their school uniforms on backwards and clutching pillows instead of booksacks. So as a rule we reserve Sunday evenings for home, early supper, school-uniform-ironing, booksack-finding, and generally planning a strategic assault on the week ahead. But since this invitation had come from Susan, a neighbor whose facility for living beautifully makes even the most slapdash of gatherings a memorable thing, we couldn’t say no. Susan lives ten miles away, so calling her a “neighbor” is less a description of proximity than it is a measure of relationship quality. She is the kind of neighbor you turn to for gardening advice, for the loan of breadmaking books, and information on how best to preserve fresh figs. Hers is the kind of garden that makes you come home convinced that living off the land is possible after all; that country living can be wholesome and tranquil and sophisticated and rewarding all at the same time. Each time we go to her house we return filled with renewed idealism for garden projects large and small. It’s a great place for big ideas and discussion of things like sustainable farming and preservation of the rural idyll. So it was the perfect place to meet Adam Aucoin—the “Chicken Man.”

March 2008

2008-02-27T08:05:00.000-08:00

My wife has been acting strangely of late. Periodically, and especially on Sundays she becomes distracted, dreamy, hard-to-reach. By evening she is shepherding the kids through supper- and bath-time with unusual urgency. Pity the child that procrastinates at bedtime on a Sunday. Even more unusual: by about 7:30 pm she’s begun speaking in strange, florid constructions. “Prithee,” she said late one chilly Sunday afternoon recently, laying her hand lightly on my arm, “Would that thou might add to the commodiousness of the drawing room by tending to the fire before drawing bathwater for the children?”

“Er, right … the drawing room,” I said uncertainly. “The one with the TV in it?”

That’s the clue, of course. Because recently, my wife has preferred to spend her Sunday evenings in the company of a tall, swarthy, rather conceited-looking fellow with a starched collar and riding boots than with me, and if he wasn’t 230 years old I’d be jealous. Ever since Louisiana Public Broadcasting launched its Masterpiece: The Complete Jane Austen series of English television adaptations of Jane Austen novels back in January, I have pretty much had to give up on any spousal interaction on Sunday evenings, while Ashley abandons the twenty-first century altogether and runs off with Mr. Darcy.

It’s been particularly hopeless during Pride and Prejudice, but honestly I can’t really expect to welcome my wife all the way back to the present day until the series ends in April. Never has there been a more enthusiastic fan of the period drama genre than Ashley. Elizabeth, Gosford Park, Jane Ayre, Mrs. Brown; if the characters are swaddled to the earlobes with top hats and kid gloves and corsets and lace, clattering around side-saddle, being bowed to, danced with and speaking as if they’ve got a mouthful of marbles, she’s going to love them.

But this is all fine. In fact, the timing couldn’t be better. If ever there was a place where an affinity for the dress and customs of the early nineteenth century serves one well, it’s St. Francisville during March, when a large percentage of the population abandons the present day altogether and leaps with unapologetic gusto into full-blown anachronism. We’re talking about the Audubon Pilgrimage of course and, primed by Pride & Prejudice, Ashley is looking forward to the experience more than ever. Why? Because that’s the weekend when she’ll be able to get gussied up in an honest-to-god Empire-waisted, 1820s-style dress complete with bonnet, gown, petticoats and other palaver and float about Afton Villa Gardens looking for all the world like Jane Bennett on her way to a garden party. So she’s on the prowl right now for an outfit of suitable style for the occasion. To date I’ve not been assigned any Pilgrimage responsibilities so perhaps I’ll be at home, entertaining the kids and hoping that no-one bearing a passing resemblance to Mr. Darcy happens upon Afton Villa this year.

Of course the Jane Austen Effect (which should probably be on the syllabus as required viewing for all Pilgrimage reenactors), won’t last forever. I think the series comes to an end in April. But even in its aftermath I suspect its shade might live on in a future generation of Pilgrimage damsels. A couple of Sundays ago our small daughter, Mathilde, somehow wangled her way into staying up well past bedtime and watching the Jane Austen episode Mansfield Park (Funny how you never notice how much ribaldry, sexual innuendo and assorted naughtiness the Victorians engaged in until there’s a rapt four-year-old perched on the couch between you). As far as she was concerned the flowing dresses, flowery speech, horse-drawn carriages and enormous, castle-like manor houses had “Princess” written all over them and she wasn’t about to miss a moment. Now Mathilde, who is not keen on bedtime at the best of times, has developed a large arsenal of ruses for escaping bed when there’s the slightest hint of Austen in the airwaves, so if we want to watch it without repeated appearances by an imploring moppet requesting water or reporting the presence of a ladybug in her room or complaining of a sore finger—all while gazing raptly at the TV—we have to avoid all mention of the series, get her to bed early, and watch it with the sound so low even the dog can’t hear it. But there’s one benefit of Mathilde’s new-found obsession with Victoriana and it’s this: when the West Feliciana Historical Society powers-that-be come looking for little girls to dress in high-waisted dresses and ribbons, to dance the traditional Maypole on Pilgrimage weekend, they’ll find no more enthusiastic volunteer than our daughter. Yes; I think they might have this one for life.

Audubon Pilgrimage, incidentally, will be celebrated March 14—16 this year. See the calendar entry on page 34 for all the details.

—James Fox-Smith, editor
james@countryroadsmag.com

February 2008

2008-01-29T13:14:00.000-08:00

Moving Forward.

The fact that I am writing this Reflections in one corner of an office that looks as if a bomb has burst in it is not necessarily an eyebrow-raising event. The talent for workplace tidiness is not one with which I was born, nor have I been able to train myself for it despite half-hearted efforts over the years. But even regular observers of my working environment might note a greater than usual dishevelment today. Stacks of paper teeter improbably on every flat surface. Books and magazines litter the floor. Tangled to redundancy, a nest of computer cables that looks like the work of some electronic buzzard spews from an open closet. In short, the room looks as if the Dance Institute of the Society of Clumsy Oafs (DISCO for short) has held a Breakdancing for Beginners class in here. It’s a disaster, and it can only mean one thing: Country Roads is finally moving.

I say “finally” because fully eleven months have elapsed since we bought the quaint but somewhat down-at-the-heel century-old raised cottage in Baton Rouge’s Beauregard Town with the intention of converting it into the high-tech nerve center of digital-age convergence that we were seeing in our mind’s eye. Sure: it needed a coat of paint, a bit of wiring and a spot of work here and there. But, beneath its twelve-foot-ceilings, bathed in the sunlight streaming through tall windows to play across its hardwood floors, we hummed the tune to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and signed on the dotted line. A year later, I can report that I know a heck of a lot more about rezoning requests, city/parish parking requirements, plan reviews, and commercial occupancy code than a Medieval European history major has any business knowing, and am beginning to suspect that the subject isn’t really my strong suit.

No matter; ‘tis done and at least we’ve learned one thing: To engage a professional moving company to aid in this relocation. When we moved into our current place five-and-a-half years ago, we threw on some old clothes and took on the task of moving an office for ten people from St. Francisville to Baton Rouge ourselves. This, it turned out, was not a terribly good idea, and had it not been for last-minute assistance by two teenage members of St. Francisville’s Benton clan, I believe we might still be trying to get the conference table up the stairs. On its side we could get the thing through the front door, but a central table leg made turning the corner into the hallway a physical impossibility. Back on the front porch and all sitting on said table, someone had the ingenious idea that we could tie a rope to the thing and hoist it up over the balcony, the railing of which was about ten feet higher off the ground than the conference table was long. I pushed from the ground floor. William and Michael Benton were upstairs, and guys, I’m not sure whether you ever told your mother the exact details, but to this day I’m convinced that if you hadn’t been on the wrong side of the balcony railing and clutching that table as tightly as you were when the rope came untied, Country Roads’ editorial staff might well have been smaller to the tune of one executive editor.

That wasn’t the only nerve-wracking incident. Backing in with too much exuberance, we got the rented moving truck stuck with its rear wheels off the ground half way up the driveway. Another volunteer representing the baby-boomer generation had some sort of minor cardiac incident after charging the stairs carrying a roll-top desk, and had to spend the rest of the day lying on the floor with a wet towel on his head. Suffice it to say that we learned there are some things best left to experts, and they will be here in a little over twelve hours to get started on moving this mess I’ve made.

So come Monday and by the time you read this, Country Roads should be open for business in a new home. It’s a new beginning of sorts, one that seems a suitable way to mark a magazine’s twenty-fifth anniversary. While we’re on the subject, I’ve got a couple of other new beginnings I’m excited to share: last week longtime Country Roads account executive Alison Rodrigue brought her first child, Ruffin Adam Rodrigue, into the world. Both Mama and little one are doing brilliantly. And another new arrival: look for the launch of an updated, reworked Country Roads Web site later this month. The new site is our production designer, Mike’s, baby. And unlike Alison’s pregnancy, the site has had a long and complicated gestation that I’m sure Mike will be glad to see the back of. The new www.countryroadsmag.com arrives packed with new features: search functions for accessing past articles and recipes, ways to leave reader feedback on stories and calendar events, and lots of clever devices for getting more out of each issue of Country Roads. We hope to launch it in early February and hope that it doesn’t need to be induced. So please! Have a look; sign up for our Milepost weekly e-newsletter, and tell us what you like, or don’t like, about what you see. We’d love to hear from you.

James Fox-Smith, editor
james@countryroadsmag.com

Reflections, January 2008

2008-01-07T13:40:00.000-08:00

Time flies.

This is the thirteenth January for which I have written an editor’s column for Country Roads. By extension, this points to the fact that one hundred and forty-four “Reflections” have preceded this one onto the pages of the magazine. This is good, as it suggests that I will ultimately succeed in getting the thing written before our absolute drop-dead deadline to send the magazine to the printer’s arrives about two hours from now. When it comes to jumpstarting the creative impulse, I have always found two things to be vital: a period of procrastination—useful for doing important work like color-coding the paper clips in my desk drawer—and a deadline so close that you can smell its terrible breath. As a result, this editor’s column is the perpetual missing link when our press time rolls around. It’s the bane of our production manager, Mike’s existence. Highly organized, Mike always has everything finished by now and is probably sitting in the next room drumming his fingers while I feverishly try to think of something clever to say. You might think that after thirteen years of doing this every month, my time management skills would have evolved to the point at which I could get the thing written earlier. But alas, that is not the case. It’s supposed to be a reflection, after all.

What’s more, careful observation of the work habits of other Country Roads creative personnel (besides Mike) leads me to the conclusion that things are not likely to change with the passage of time. With mere minutes to go before the inaugural issue of Country Roads’ twenty-fifth anniversary year goes to press, mine isn’t the only thing missing. So I’d like to take a moment to recognize the most luminous last-minuter of them all: our art director, cover designer, Baton Rouge artist elder-stateswoman and wellspring of all things creative and terminally behind schedule, Anna Macedo.

Without Anna there would not be—and never would have been—a Country Roads. Twenty-five years ago it was to Anna that CR founder Dorcas turned to come up with a look and a feel for the magazine she had in her mind’s eye. At the time, Anna was a Baton Rouge advertising titan with an agency of her own. She was also longtime buddies with Susan Lindsey, Michael Hesse, and Kenwood Kennon, all of whom happened to be hanging out on the porch of The Shade Tree in St. Francisville one afternoon in 1982 when Dorcas was expounding on this magazine idea of hers. So Dorcas went to see Anna, and participated in the first in a series of slight misunderstandings that have come to shape Country Roads as much as any other thing.

“Anna, do you think we can do a magazine called Country Roads?” asked Dorcas, meaning to test the project’s economic viability by leveraging Anna’s knowledge of reader and advertiser demand, niche marketing, and regional demographics.

“Oh, surrrre!” replied Anna, with visions of a walking horse logo, meadows of wildflowers, and chapbook butterfly art floating before her eyes.

No matter, each participant left the conversation with their optimism for the magazine intact, and Anna was soon at work on a layout.

Thirteen years ago, when my wife Ashley and I became Country Roads’ second and third employees, we went back to Anna to redesign the magazine to its current size. As I recall, we worked on it (no computers—still hot wax and rollers and cut-and-paste at that point) for about three months. With forty-five minutes to go until press time, we realized we’d forgotten to consider the cover. Anna chopped up a chapbook of old-fashioned clip art with a huge pair of scissors, and glued the bits back together in a sort of mosaic that somehow came to define the magazine’s art cover approach from that day forward.

So, with the dawn of our twenty-fifth year brightening the horizon, with our press deadline ticking inexorably to a conclusion, and with me homing in on the closing sentence of my 145th editor’s reflections, it seems almost serendipitous that there should still be another unfilled page in our January issue—the one slated for Anna’s Countrypolitans article. But I’m not scared. After thirteen … or twenty-five … years of doing this, I’d hardly have it any other way.

Happy New Year, one and all. And happy reading.

James Fox-Smith, editor

Holiday Reflections

2007-12-04T14:17:00.000-08:00

By the time you read this, the season to be jolly will be well and truly upon us. Everything unlikely to get up and leave will have been decked with sprays of holly and plastic snow. Public places will be thick with ring-ding-dingalinging and pa-rum-pum-pum-pumming. There seems to have been more talk about how early the holiday shopping season is getting started this year, but at the time of writing, a day or two prior to Thanksgiving, the sights and sounds of Christmas cheer still seem a bit muted, mostly drowned out by talk of turkey. Sure; go to the mall in search of a basting brush or a new twenty-pound-gobbler-sized roasting pan and you’ll make your way to it past the first glitterings of Christmas decorations. The sight of them mystified our daughter. Like most other red-blooded American children, Mathilde has a highly evolved internal clock that enables her to keep track of the time remaining until the next birthday, Easter, Christmas or other occasion that might involve presents or chocolate with atomic precision. Of course when you’re four, and you’ve been schooled by your parents not to go on and on about what you want for Christmas, a month is an eternity. So Mathilde greeted the presence of Christmas trees and tinsel and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer at the mall with the deep suspicion of a child from whom something has been withheld. “Why is the Christmas tree here now?!” she inquired, querulously, of every authority figure she encountered—the Queen Bee shop lady, her music teacher, the Salvation Army bell-ringing person. Apparently a good question. No-one, in her opinion, returned a satisfactory response.

Still, I admit that Christmas commerce is in full swing at our house. This is not because we’re inherently well-organized or convinced that an earlier Christmas is a better Christmas. It’s because if most of our gifts aren’t selected, wrapped, cocooned in peanuts, boxed, taped, labeled and handed across the post office counter before Thanksgiving, they’re not going to make it to their Australian recipients in time. American retailers who have their holiday decorations up and are already torturing their store personnel with the Barbara Streisand Christmas album in mid-November have finally gotten into step with the amount of time it takes for a package to make it from Louisiana to Melbourne. I’m not complaining; the fact that a parcel handed to the cheerful lady at the St. Francisville post office can possibly make it across the country, across the Pacific, and across Melbourne, to be precariously stuffed into the saddlebag of a little red motorbike that an Australian postman will then ride through my mother’s flowerbeds to deposit on her doorstep, still astonishes me. It’s just that, by the time the impossible journey has been made, our carefully wrapped offerings generally arrive three weeks into January, squashed into interesting new shapes, aand occasionally bearing signs of close scrutiny—sometimes involving scissors—by customs people. There’re few things as heartwarming as unwrapping the sweater from your mother to find a ragged hole cut in the front of it, the mangled wrapping re-secured by the reassuring label, “Your package was opened for inspection and found not to contain any prohibited items.” Well, thank goodness.

Inter-hemispheric gift exchange presents other challenges. Given that the Australian Christmas falls in the middle of summer, sweaters and woolly hats aren’t good choices, even if they slip by the scissor-wielding customs guy. Fragile, delicate things are out for obvious reasons. Heavy stuff isn’t good either. We try to abide by a rule of thumb that the cost to mail a gift should not exceed the purchase price of the actual gift. Which rules out ceramic garden gnomes, handmade paperweights, sugar kettles, decorative boat anchors, and Chef Folse’s exceptional Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine. There is a way around this restriction, which is to procure, parcel and post our Australian Christmas gifts by early July, in time for them to make the journey by sea mail. But whenever I consider this option I am reminded of that Tom Hanks movie Castaway, and feel compelled to buy gifts that would be useful to survivors of a South Pacific shipwreck (fishing gear, compass, floatation aid, waterproof matches); and in any case, we’ve never managed to time it right.

So what’s left? Tea towels are good. Weird hot sauce is good if properly cocooned. The other day I found a traveler’s sun hat, the main selling point of which was its ability to be comprehensively squashed, then returned to its original shape. We bought a couple of beautifully carved (lightweight) wooden hummingbirds at Covington’s Three Rivers Art Festival last week. It would be nice to send more locally made arts and crafts to a place where they will be truly unique. But most of them present a fragility challenge. Our daughter said it well. After a couple of high-strung hours spent inspecting the exquisite, mostly breakable handmade objects in artists’ booths at the Three Rivers festival, Mathilde’s mother asked her the question, “What is art?”
“Mama, art is something you’d better not touch,” she replied firmly. Tell that to the customs people.

There’s another thing that, sadly, won’t be getting air-mailed to Australia this Christmas on account of its impressive dimensions. But for everyone not required to ship their gifts half way around the world, I’d like to draw your attention to the latest book by regular contributer and original Country Roads editor, Anne Butler. Her book The Spirit of St. Francisville marries Anne’s clear-eyed grasp of the Felicianas’ past and present with atmospherically beautiful photography by Darryl Chitty. It’s an especially handsome coffee-table-worthy tribute to what makes St. Francisville special. Easy to wrap, too.

So happy holiday shopping, everyone. And more to the point, Happy Holidays.