10 Years Ago: Louisiana: Sweet Potato Talk

 

I do love sweet potatoes. 

 

Sweet potatoes. Longmont, Colorado. June 2023. Credit: Mzuriana.

The original source, from Al Jazeera, about "troubling work conditions for North Carolina laborers" who harvest sweet potatoes is no longer accessible. Here is a November 2015 replacement source from NPR: Behind Your Holiday Sweet Potato Dish, Hard Work in the Fields. 

Friday, August 14, 2015

Louisiana: Sweet Potato Talk

2010 Yambilee poster, Yambilee Festival Building, Opelousas, Louisiana

I was standing in line at my neighborhood grocery store the other day, and a man came up behind me with only one item to buy, so I invited him to move ahead of me. A happy consequence is that he noticed the two gigantic sweet potatoes I had among my stash, and this sparked a memory for him.

Yam sign outside Yambilee Festival Building, Opelousas, Louisiana

When he was a kid, he dug up sweet potatoes during the harvest from, he said, first thing in the morning til the end of the day. It was terrible hard work, he said, but at mid-day, the labor was suspended for a large meal, which gave him energy to re-commence with the work in the afternoon. The man allowed as how it made him feel strong and good. ... though I suspect this is more how it feels to him in retrospect than at the time.

Sweet potato patties, Walmart,t Lafayette, Louisiana

The man observed that digging the sweet potatoes is no longer necessary, as there is a machine that can do it now.

Yambilee Festival Building, Opelousas, Lousiana

Recently, I've been buying sweet potatoes in bulk because the price at my local grocer is so giddily low right now and I love the durn things. I bake two racks of them at a time, skin them, distribute them into portions, then freeze the portions in freezer bags.

Sweet potato chips, Louisiana

The man's story got me to thinking about sweet potato agriculture.

The American leaders of sweet potato production, in order from largest to smallest, are:

1. North Carolina
2. California
3. Mississippi
4. Louisiana

Louisiana State University produced the video, The Sweet Truth About Sweet Potatoes, which focuses on commercial sweet potato agriculture, from planting to harvesting and curing:

Based on what I've learned in the above video, I'm thinking the sweet potatoes I'm buying today are those that were harvested last year.

What I see in the LSU video about commercial sweet potato agriculture in Louisiana is at odds with the troubling work conditions for North Carolina laborers that I'm reading about [in 2015]. In the LSU video, I see mechanical harvesting (which conforms with what the gentleman at the grocery store told me), but the reports about North Carolina refer to hand-harvesting, which is where labor abuses come in.

North Carolina Sweet Potatoes [said] this about mechanical vs. hand-harvesting [at the time of the original post in 2015]:

"Sweet potato roots are turned up on top of the ground by a side angle disk plow and partially exposed to aid the workers in picking and sorting. Sweet potatoes are very susceptible to damage at harvest; therefore hand-harvest is preferred over mechanical harvesting. ... To harvest, the field rows are usually plowed with a modified disk or moldboard plow with a spiral attachment. Roots are then hand harvested and graded in the field. Sweet potatoes can also be dug by a chain digger or a riding harvester that conveys the roots to a sorting crew using a harvest aide. Potato harvesters are sometimes used to harvest sweet potatoes but damage is usually unacceptably high."

Even though Louisiana might use mechanical harvesting, and therefore maybe there aren't all of the same labor equity concerns here as in North Carolina, there is still a question about how commercial farmers in Louisiana protect workers during and after pesticide spraying.

Just as the movement builds to protect people from second-hand smoke in businesses .... when we have an opportunity to do so, let's encourage our food suppliers, legislators, and local, state, and federal regulatory agencies to create and enforce safeguards to protect agricultural workers (and their families - and consumers) from unhealthy work and living conditions (when provided by the farmers). Some advocacy and regulatory organizations include:

Farmworker Justice
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
United Farm Workers



On a different note ... Do you notice how I side-stepped the whole yam versus sweet potato conversation? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Word of the Year: Meditation: Coloring

 

Adult coloring books aren't anything new, of course. Coloring can get us into a flow, allow us to relax. There is also the idea of coloring to practice mindfulness and meditation.

There are legions of mandalas out there to color, but that's not where my interest lies. I like birds. And I like drawings I can color to completion in less than half an hour. 

Both Thriftbooks and BetterWorldBooks have Audubon Bird Coloring Books for sale. 

There are also coloring books that self-brand as "mindfulness coloring books." A mindfulness coloring book by Emma Farrarons drew me in right away with the cover's smple and soothing waves that would suit me well: 

Book creator: Emma Farrarons. Publisher: The Experiment Publishing

What coloring tools work well for this mindful coloring? 

Art Therapy Coloring recommends what we should and shouldn't use for adult coloring books. The following is among the shoulds: 

• Colored pencils
• Colored pens
• Gel pens
• Fine tip markers
• Watercolor pencils

There are online coloring apps for touchscreen devices. I've looked at a few, but I want to spend less time on electronic devices, not more. So for now, I will let that option rest. 

10 Years Ago: Rootless Brow-zing

 

I ventured into threading again while in Tucson. Ouch. 

In my search for past posts that touched on waxing, threading, plucking, or razoring, I uncovered one from 2014, in which a stranger in Louisiana uttered this proposition to me: 

"I'd really like to wax your car." 

 

 

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Rootless Brow - zing

The other day, I had my brows waxed. While I lay on the table, I remembered other such times.

In Awassa, Ethiopia, two men at a salon threaded my brows. After my brows got cleaned up, I continued my walk "home," and saw:  

... there were 15 giant storks. Huge. One alighted, then disgorged food into the mouths of two gangly "teenagers." I watched, agog. A short walk further, directly before me, another tree filled with storks. Walking underneath (glad I had my hat on), I looked up and counted more than 10 oversize nests. As with the Bale Mountain forest, this was the stuff of medieval fairy tales.

Around the corner-ish from my temporary digs in Istanbul, I got my whole face threaded. Amazing how that works, cause you wouldn't think it would.

In 2010, on a road trip with my mother, I had my face cleaned up in a Walmart in Canyon City, Texas.

In Rustavi, Georgia, there were a couple of rugged waxings at a local salon. Yeow. But speaking of Caucasus Georgia, the Georgian women have spectacular brows.

Here's one woman's experience getting her brows done in Nice (waxed) and Palestine (tweezed).

 

Word of the Year: Meditation: Beads and Seeds

 

Mala beads from lotus seeds. Attribution: SecretLondon on wikicommons.

 

 

As I explored how meditation / mindfulness could flow into my daily life, I remembered my maternal grandmother, who prayed with her rosary. 

In its explanation of how to pray the rosary, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops includes this: 

The repetition in the Rosary is meant to lead one into restful and contemplative prayer related to each Mystery. The gentle repetition of the words helps us to enter into the silence of our hearts, where Christ's spirit dwells. The Rosary can be said privately or with a group.

I'm agnostic, but the value of "entering into the silence of our hearts" resonates.

 

While on this mental journey, my road journey put me alongside two women who create jewelry with beads. One woman I already knew; the second was a woman I met in an Alaskan airbnb. The former was a colleague from my time in Caucasus Georgia - following our tenure there, she traveled to Ghana to learn about beads in jewelry-making. The latter has created jewelry with trade beads for decades.  

Thus the natural turn of study onto the use of beads in a meditation practice.

I paused my draft of this post to poke through my cache of broken jewelry pieces for beads that I might fashion into a circle for meditation. I discovered I do have the beginnings of something. I am enthusiastic about what I will create.

 

Candlemas Day. Artist: Marianne Stokes, Tate Britain Collection. Public Domain.

 

 

So far on 2025's word of the year

January 2025:  Word of the Year

February 2025: Meditation

March 2025: Into Action

April 2025: May You Be

May 2025:

 

 

10 Years Ago: Opelousas: The Fall of a Blessed Tree

 

There's nothing I can add to this ten-year old post. Unless I were to add cat pictures. Which I won't.

 

 

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Opelousas: The Fall of a Blessed Tree

Blessed tree, Opelousas, Louisiana. June 2015.

Once upon a time, I read a magazine article by a man whose hobby was to travel to different parts of the world while history was being made in those exact parts. When the Berlin Wall fell, for example, he scooped up his kids and they flew to Berlin from the US to be witnesses.*

I've often thought about that practice, it's damn cool, but how many of us have the means to do the same? Not me.

Well, not me on such a large stage.

But I can be a witness to some historic events, and the recent fall of a blessed pecan tree was one of them. When I say blessed, I mean the Virgin Mary appeared in this tree during the 1970 and 1990s, prompting many folks to visit the backyard of a house on Larry Street, where the pecan tree stood.

Blessed tree, Opelousas, Louisiana. June 2015.

I read about the tree in this Opelousas Daily World article: A Dramatic Final Act for a Famous Local Tree, by Cheryl Devall.

I couldn't get over there for a few days, and I was a little worried that it'd be all chopped up by the time I did get there. But it wasn't, and I was even able to chat with the owner's caregiver and grown daughter.

Blessed tree, Opelousas, Louisiana. June 2015.

 

 

 

And the daughter let me take a stick that came from the blessed tree. Personally, I don't put much truck in these kinds of things, but I don't demean them, either. Blessed sticks are no less magical than nutritional supplements, juicing cleanses, or Warren Buffett, and we know all those things to be holy. 

It feels good to have this stick from a tree beloved by many people, and some day I'll come across someone who needs it.  

Blessed tree, Opelousas, Louisiana. June 2015.

I like the intimacy between the sacred and mundane in the picture above - a holy tree with pretty offerings, next to a stubby, cheery barbecue grill. There's a little flavor of the magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude, where the impossible and the possible get along just fine.

There's nothing I can add to what the article covered, except for one thing: I asked the daughter if it had been a good pecan producer in its day, and the immediate response was a chortled no!

I am pleased to offer a cat pic (!) on this blog, thanks to the blessed tree visit. She bewitched me into taking her photo and publishing it here, that green-eyed temptress: 

Opelousas cat on Larry Street. June 2015.

*This reminds me of a sci-fi story where people from the future came to the past and rented rooms in a - let's call it a form of airbnb - house somewhere in Italy. They knew this particular house in this city in this country would have a commanding view of the sun going supernova or something, and they wanted first row seats. .... Then there's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, one of the books from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where people can travel far (really, really far) into the future, just before the universe collapses, but have a good meal first.

 

Word of the Year: Meditation: Walking Meditation

 

Plank trail, Deer Isle, Maine. Credit: Mzuriana

 

I've known folks who have created a walking labyrinth, and I've walked a handful. Of course, we don't need a labyrinth for a walking meditation. 

I walk each day, but for one of my walks to be a walking meditation, I must take that walk naked, in a sense. In other words, no music or podcasts in my ears. No rewriting history. No constructing a future. No problem-solving. No conversations with people who aren't walking with me. 

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote The Long Road Turns to Joy, his book on walking meditations. An excerpt here, shared by mindfulnessandwellbeing: 

Walking in mindfulness brings us peace and joy, and makes our life real. Why rush? Our
final destination will only be the graveyard. Why not walk in the direction of life, enjoying
peace in each moment with every step? There is no need to struggle. Enjoy each step. We
have already arrived.

Here's a plainspoken instructional for how to walk in meditation, even in a small space.

Pan-American Road Trip: The End of the Road For Two Old Friends

We met in 2010, and bonded quickly. Together, we traveled to: 

• Playa del Carmen, Mexico
• All over Ethiopia
• All over Caucasus Georgia
• Antigua and Lake Atitlan, Guatemala
• Mexico City
• Toronto, Canada
•  .. and multiple points in the US

 

I had to let them go this month. One, hopefully, to a new home by way of a thrift store donation. The other, regrettably, to its grave, as its body finally succumbed to years of hard labor as my portable office. 

My green, wheeled bag. Re-homed in Fairbanks, Alaska. May 2025. Credit: Mzuriana.

My portable office, expired after years of service, in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. May 2025. Credit: Mzuriana.

In the years since I bought the two bags, my green bag had outgrown airlines' current size restrictions for carry-on bags, and the backpack's weight and mass, empty, exceeded that of more modern backpacks. So their loss, while sad, opens the door to lighter, smaller bags.

For the southern portion of my Pan-American Road Trip, I will join the legions of travelers who seek The Perfect Backpack to carry most of my stuff. 

Maggi Fuchs is one such seeker.