Author: Lili LeGardeur

Buddy in the Spotlight

A Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer unexpectedly shows up at the farm in the middle of a storm, and the family dog steals the show.

Pondering Big Cities from the Farm

I squeeze myself into a tiny chair next to a knee-high table. It’s the same Pre-K classroom where, it seems like only yesterday,  my sons were cutting out Valentines with safety scissors and napping on Kindermats. Beside me is our…

The Rural Life: “Cheap” is Good – Sometimes

I have fond yet vaguely disturbing memories of the college student who – devoid of a job or any income – charged not one but two pairs of expensive cowboy boots to a credit card in a single afternoon. I…

On Being “A Farmer’s Wife”

I once gave a friend a few quotes for a parenting article she was doing for a women’s magazine. Because the magazine discouraged its writers from interviewing other writers as its “real parents,” she described me as “a farmer’s wife.”…

Country Boredom, Country Fun

Every once in a while, when I hear about the exciting, fun-filled adventures of some friend in the city,  I feel a twinge of envy.My last gig before farm wife, you see, was as a single 20-something magazine writer in…

To Hunt or Not To Hunt

Any day now, I will open up our local newspaper and see the photo that never fails to dredge up the same old mixed emotions. Staring out at me from amongst the gray columns will be a child dressed entirely…

katrina in the country

On days when I think I’ll go stark raving mad if I have to fold one more load of laundry or unload the dishwasher one more time, I’ll think back to a September afternoon five years ago.It was about two…

Critters gone wild

Whenever anyone mentions overboard, animal-loving do-gooders, my husband’s father tells the story about me and the skunks.It occurred shortly after I arrived here from Atlanta, lugging all my starry-eyed notions about cute little furry creatures and –– if you asked…

Gone Home Again

My paternal grandparents in South Alabama died a few months apart when I was 8.  My family had never lived any closer to their farm than a four-and-a-half-hour drive, so we saw them maybe a few times a year. As…

That old truck: It ain’t so bad.

Last summer’s Cash for Clunkers program sure got the old wheels turning around here. Not that we were seriously in the market for a new ride. It’s just that “cash” and “clunkers” are two words guaranteed to make any farmer’s…

A river runs through it

Looking back, I must have believed life would always be like my first weekend at the river.It was July 1990, approximately six weeks after my future husband and I met on a Florida beach. In honor of my first visit…

A Labor of Love

The boys and I have been reading Little House on the Prairie. They don’t seem to notice any similarities between themselves and the pioneering Ingalls children, but me and that Mrs. Ingalls? We could talk. We could definitely talk.Take the…

Six degrees of Franklinton

For my husband’s birthday last October, I ordered the memoir by former LSU football player John Ed Bradley, It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium. For purposes of secrecy, I had the gift shipped to me at my neighbors’ address. I…

The Rural Life

I was raised in the city by a former farm boy, but, to his chagrin, my father’s farm-forged values were not always enthusiastically embraced by his citified offspring. It drove my daddy to distraction, for instance, that his teenaged daughters…

Between some rocks and a hard place

If you were looking for our farm 10 years ago, it would have been hard to tell where our place ended and the next began. Back then, this was dairy country. The view was nearly one continuous vista of forestland…

Milk it.

I’m standing in a concrete pit, eyeball-to-udder with a big black and white lady named No. 418. In my hand is a device resembling a robotic spider. It has a palm-sized, stainless steel body with four black rubber tubes extending…

The Rural Life: Raising Kids on the Farm

One morning I found a crumpled sticky note on which our 7-year-old son had scribbled this ardent petition to God or Santa Claus or most likely, me – the parent perceived to be the biggest pushover:“I wish I had a…

the rural life: Making Hay

Sometimes life on a hay farm feels like a cross between Winslow Homer and a Norman Rockwell painting. Like one Saturday not long ago … (Cue swirly flashback sequence.)Mathew and Andy BienvenuMelissa Bienvenu photographI’m at the wheel of our battered…

The Rural Life

Ed. note: With this issue we introduce a new column, “The Rural Life” by Melissa H. Bienvenu. Ms. Bienvenu (no relation to food writer Marcelle Bienvenu), lives with her husband and family on a farm near Franklington in Washington Parish.…