Butte La Rose

Bonjour!
Music to my ears! As busy as the parish equipment and workers are, having to spread themselves thin covering a wide area, I heard the tractor working in the ditch in front of my house. Bridge tender T-Black Daigle was there on the tractor trimming trees that were hanging over the road. They do keep up the trimming. I used do some of it myself, but I just can’t do it anymore. Bien merci!
Flashback: There is a very large chemical refinery in Point Comfort, Texas, on Highway 35 south of Houston. It covers about a square mile. Every now and then I picked up a load there. Rules were upon arrival you’d drive your rig with your tank up to a huge gate. No one tends this gate. It is controlled by remote from a building that sits about a quarter mile away.
A camera is aimed at every truck that pulls up to that gate. After you have been identified on camera, the gate opens and you come inside and pull up on the scale.
After you’re on the scale, you get out of your truck and go into a small guard shack just a few steps aside from the scale. Just inside the shack is a machine that will spit out your weight ticket. You take this ticket with you and follow the arrows and signs that guide you to the rack destination.
Once you reach this point, you have to park your truck and wait your turn to get loaded. The workers at the entry point who handle the cameras and the intercom system announce your arrival on the intercom.
That road leading to that refinery had endless lonely looking places of many humongous buildings now empty and deserted, lonely, barren, forsaken, abandoned, and still. One can imagine all the people who once worked in the area. The hustle and bustle is no more. As I sat alone in my rig, waiting to be loaded, my gaze swept the area, made me wonder where were all these hard working people that once populated this complex. Where are they working now?
Well, when my time came to pull up, then back in under the loading rack, I did. On their intercom, these loaders all know who is there by the main gate announcing the trucker’s name and rig number on the intercom. One day after I had backed in I was waiting for my tank to start shaking from the loading. I realized they had not been using my name and truck number when announcing me. Instead on their intercom came the sounds of, meow, meow, meow. That was not done directly at me. It was just a joke among the employees there to let everyone know that solo “female” driver is there. That way some of the people from around the plant knew to come and talk with me. I never let them know I had caught on to their “meows pussycat” signal. I figured in that lonely looking place, let them have their fun.
Remember the Evangeline State Park in St. Martinville many years ago? And back when the St. John bridge was a narrow old rusted one lane iron bridge with a railroad track running through the middle? I read in the Teche News that both the park and the track will come back to use in the future. That will be great. Many years ago my Uncle Ninn Boudreaux tended the park. It will bring life back to the town and will have more to offer locals and tourists a lagniappe to tour around. I remember the fenced-in deer.

Cousine Hélène
337-280-1988.
helenboudreaux@juno.com.