Baja St. Martin

The wind has been blowing from the south the past two days, but Belle River and the spillway have continued to fall. At the Belle River landing, all three launches are in use, the parking lot is fully available, the bathroom is usable (I think), and the big yellow dumpsters are still on the highway side of the levee and full. There has been a lot of traffic on my road, Hwy. 997, trucks and trailers and boats heading to the landing. I assume people are out looking for crawfish. And so far, I have heard nothing about anyone catching anything of quantity.
I did see that all along Hwy. 70 going to Pierre Part, the crawfish buying stands are being repaired, rebuilt, built anew, signs freshened. Most are old ones but a few are new. By new I mean new buyer.
Stephensville Elementary is back in session after a week off. There will be Food for Seniors on Feb. 25 and also on Feb. 25 a Recreation Board meeting in Belle River at 6 p.m. The public is always invited to these meetings.
A friend gave me a homemade wind chime which is now hanging right outside my back door. It is made of glass with a wooden ball and clapper and the sound it makes is really pretty – but persistent. I’m not sure if I can leave it so close to the house.
I have not been watching the TV news about political debaters very much, but did hear of Justice Scalia’s passing. Each week I get a newsletter called BookNotes Plus and this last time it included a short article about the unusual words Justice Scalia was heard to use. Jiggery-pokery, sheer applesauce, kulturkampf, argle-bargle, SCOTUS, POTUS and FLOTUS. (That last one referred to the First Lady of the United States.) They all had an origin – i.e., not just made up of whole cloth, but I guess Scalia was famous for his language! It would have been fun to actually have heard Scalia talk using some of these words! Hard to imagine how you could work “jiggery-pokery” into a normal sentence.
The purple martins left for over a week, but are now back and busily checking out the two houses on my dock. There are some other birds present also, as there were last year, but they seemed to all cohabit peacefully, so I guess there’s not much I can do about it. Since the martins are moving in I felt it incumbent to put out a hummingbird feeder also. Maybe they all pass the good-weather news around!
No wood ducks yet that I can see, but as I told the man who is a wood duck expert around here, I rarely see the mama duck. One year I didn’t even know the box was in use until I drove too close with my lawnmower and a duck erupted from the box, scaring us both half to death. (She came back, thankfully.)
The Feb. 16 bingo crowd was a little light, but Morgan Ochsner and her associate, Gary Mosser, from Humana, brought a beautiful cake decorated with Happy Birthday in red. Unfortunately, there were no February birthday people present so we just stuck a candle in the cake and sang “Happy Birthday” to us!
There was a nasty little storm on Tuesday last – high winds, hail, rain and within 20 minutes it was all over and the sun was shining again. I do now have to rake the yard free of the little tree branches which are all over. I love my golden rain tree but it makes a mess on the ground. I’ve planted green beans and carrots but nothing is emerging into daylight yet.

Teche News’ Lower St. Martin correspondent, Linda Cooke, can be e-mailed at lindacooke1939@gmail.com.