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Tales From Lickskillet
by Sally MacDonald
Liv Fun: Vol 3 – Issue 4
My mother’s family homestead is at the leafy green intersection of Johns Road and Johns Gin Road, named for her people who farmed cotton and ginned it there. They called it a plantation. But even in its heyday it wasn’t one of those gracious Gone With the Wind plantations that sprawled across the Civil War landscape of the South.
Rather, it was a large farm, a once-bustling presence in the rural heartland of Northwestern Louisiana, near Shreveport. Home was a comfortable single-story white house of wood perched atop brick stilts as tall as a man. Wide steps led to a shady veranda across the front. An open breezeway ran through the middle of the house, with bedrooms and sitting rooms on either side.
In the old days, the cookhouse was a separate building out back. The space under the main house was a commissary with packed dirt for a floor, where tobacco, food staples and quinine for malaria were once doled out to slaves, and, after the war, to those who continued to scratch out an existence in the fields.
Mom took me there a few years ago when I was going through one of those “where did I really come from?” periods. We didn’t know who owned the house now, so we peered through the trees from the side of the road as Mom talked about days gone by.
I suppose we all have questions like the ones that haunt me now and then, times when we obsess a little over what our forebears were really like, what they thought about the world they lived in, and what life lessons may have been lost in the debris of family history.
That homestead was the backdrop for stories that told Mom who she was and who her people were.
But today we are a society that moves often and discards easily. The lessons of home that the soul recognizes the values and moral compasses we inherit are perhaps more elusive for my generation and the ones that will follow.
Liv Fun
by Leisure Care
Winter 2014
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With These Hands
by Cameron Stark
Land locked between Mozambique and South Africa sits Swaziland, a country about the size of New Jersey, where more than 60 percent of the population lives in poverty, the average life expectancy is 46 years old, and one in six children under the age of 15 are parentless from HIV/AIDS.
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Tales From Lickskillet
by Sally MacDonaldMy mother’s family homestead is at the leafy green intersection of Johns Road and Johns Gin Road, named for her people who farmed cotton and ginned it there. They called it a plantation. But even in its heyday it wasn’t one of those gracious Gone With the Wind plantations that sprawled across the Civil War landscape of the South.
Read More
How to Cope When Mental Illness Hits Home
by Evan Kimble
My daughter-in-law hates me and has said vile things to me. She thinks I’m evil, and she’s stolen my son from me. When they first started dating, she adored my son and was very good to me. After they got married, she somehow decided I was the enemy.