Category Archives: Family

Remembering with Christmas Cards

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A few nights back, we sat at our kitchen table and wrote out our Christmas cards. Our house is still undecorated, as it is our personal tradition to put up a tree, decorations, and greenery the week before Christmas. Although, on the mantle, over the woodstove, there are a smattering of early arrival cards. Not entirely festive, yet. But it is in the air, you know.

This post, below, was published back in 2016. Since that date many of the older generation of friends and family have passed away. But we both have nieces and nephews who have moved out, married, and now have growing families of their own, since I wrote this piece. So, the list as we worked through it remained both familiar and new, a summary of the arc of life contained in an address list.

With Vince Guaraldi in the background, we wrote and addressed our annual Christmas cards last night. An old-fashioned exercise that echoes in our warm kitchen with news of the past year. Our modest notes convey best wishes, some with hopes to see more of this friend or that family member in the coming year. Inevitably there are deletions due to death, divorce, or the odd friend who drifted away.

Sending Christmas cards is a practice in the naming of the past, a remembrance of the history of our friendships and family ties. For myself, the ritual is carried out with little eloquence and appalling handwriting. Yet, each year I look forward to the occasion.

We sit amicably at the table for a few hours before a late dinner, occasionally commenting but mostly in silence. We jot down a few words to convey knowledge of intimate details. There are those to whom wishing joy seems misplaced: the friend whose only sibling collapsed this season after shoveling snow, a nephew and niece still feeling the loss of their mother, the friend facing his second Christmas as a widow after the unexpected death of his wife, my cousin.

There are friends and family far away that we visit with seldom except through letters or phone calls. The friend I met in an Asheville pub one evening who has a longstanding invitation to visit our farm from her village in England. Another in London whose annual Christmas Day call is a tradition of over 26 years. The friends in town and in our valley that we see often and would see more of if our lives were not so busy.

The act of signing the card becomes a bridge. Though the words are too short and not particularly profound, the underlying message is that there is a bond. That there is a connection across distance and time and in some cases through death that each card represents. It gives us a moment to reflect with gratitude on those who are part of our lives.

Remembering the Old Ones

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Mutton

They gave me an old metal bucket full of whole corn kernels and stood me out near the front yard in a big corral. One of the men yelled a long high-pitched call. Then he called again, head cocked and listening, looking out towards the woods. “Here they come,” he said. “When they get close, empty that bucket on the ground and walk over here.” I don’t recall being afraid, just fascinated, as at least fifty grown hogs came out of the woods at a run. Those pigs ran right past a two-acre corn patch, enclosed by another wooden fence, and up to where I had dumped the corn. They snorted and pushed each other around while the men who had gathered closed up the gates for the night. Nearby was a cluster of horned Cracker cattle grazing. They had the full access to about a hundred acres of woods and the homestead, as did the hogs.

Sitting in a ten-acre clearing was the farm’s house, two shotguns covered by one roof, each side with a room leading directly into the next, separated by ten feet of an open breezeway and built off the ground. Across the front of the conjoined buildings was a front porch. The breezeway led to the kitchen, a large room that could be entered from either side of the house. The roof was of tin and shaded by two massive pecan trees in the front and a giant pear tree in the back. In the shadow of the pear was a large wooden cistern that collected rainwater. I don’t remember a well, although I’m sure there was one.

It was my first visit with my family to the farm of my soon-to-be stepmother’s great-grandparents in North Louisiana. Both were in their late nineties. The year was around 1967, which means they had to have been born soon after the Civil War.

The house was full of her family at the time of this visit. There was no running water or electricity. Come evening, I recall, the rooms were illuminated by kerosene lanterns, which cast an orange glow that flickered into shadows and on the faces of all the kin congregated in the kitchen. As the evening turned to night, we kids were brought in one at a time, naked, to take a bath in a galvanized washtub placed on the floor in the middle of the gathering. It was one of those old-fashioned kinds in which even as a skinny kid of four I had to cross my legs to fit inside. The adults had emptied a couple of buckets of rainwater into the tub. I was too young to be embarrassed, but my older brother still remembers being so.

Around the farm there were a number of low-slung outbuildings made of stacked logs. An old corn crib, built off the ground to keep rats out, sat off to the back of the house. The outhouse was close to the back door for obvious reasons. Chickens were everywhere pecking in the dust. The elders died soon after, and on subsequent trips the animals were gone, the dirt was covered over by brush, and the woods were getting closer to the homestead. My father would mow through thick overgrown grass outside the house with an old beast of a Yazoo mower.

On one visit we collected pears from the backyard tree, and each May for several years we would drive up there to pick blackberries. We’d bring a Rattlesnake watermelon, a thirty-pounder that we’d eat on the porch steps after lunch, spitting the seeds into the dirt. One year, after some of the timber had been sold, we drove from Lake Charles just to put a metal tag on each stump with a number. The loggers had been given permission to cut just so much, and my father was a careful sort who trusted but verified. On another trip he brought a shotgun. He and my stepmother took turns target shooting as the other tossed the clay pigeons in the air. My younger sister Kathryn, who was maybe a year old, would hold her hands over her ears and cry.

By around 1972 we had stopped visiting the old farm altogether. The last memory I have of it is that the house had been torn down or moved and now there was just an opening in a clearing. More siblings were born, and our large family had other things to do than make a four-hour drive north for blackberries. Thinking back, it is hard for me to say with certainty, but I’m fairly sure that my glimpse of the old people and the old ways, before all was swept away, shaped some of my outlook and even the life I lead today.

………………………………………………………………………..

Reading this weekend: Saying No! to a Farm Free Future (C. Smaje), a smart and articulate defense of small diverse farming and agrarian-localism. And, King’s Day (T.E. Porter), a lovely and brutal novella about hog killing day on a Florida farm.

Until I Cross Water; or, Hot Boudin, Cold Coush-Coush

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Note: this is a recent essay of mine that was published in Local Culture: a journal of the Front Porch Republic. LC is an old fashioned print journal. Which means it comes in the mail and you can hold it. You can subscribe at www.frontporchrepublic.com

 

Until I Cross Water; or, Hot Boudin, Cold Coush-Coush *

Crossing waters

The hundred-pound carcass is in the truck bed cooling on ice. Before me, stretching out in the morning sunlight in long looping curves, is 49 miles of Highway 15, a narrow two-lane road perched atop the Mississippi River levee in Central Louisiana. The previous Saturday I had butchered the hog with the help of a friend on my East Tennessee farm. We started the frosty morning with a warming shot of home-distilled muscadine brandy, just because. In the woods, the grunting hogs gathered around us, impatient for their breakfast. The one I was to kill was smaller than the others, an abdominal hernia having stunted her growth. Raising my .30-30, I shot her between the eyes from about three feet. She dropped instantly, motionless, onto the forest floor. Killing animals is an integral part of life on a farm. It’s a gruesome task that, especially in the case of those you have raised, is best done without much premeditation or fanfare—it is always good to just get on with the traitorous deed. I set the rifle down and we rolled her onto her back before starting the bloody business of sticking. Meanwhile, the other pigs continued to eat just a few feet away without any real concern. Porcine compassion, like our own, seems in short supply.

The hard part done, we began with the scalding, scraping, and eviscerating. My friend had recently become an American citizen, and we chatted about upcoming projects on both of our farms and discussed the politics of his native Germany and the U.S. Because here is the thing about a slaughter day: even elbow-deep in the still-warm carcass of a dead hog, life goes on. The dogs stayed close, the flock of sheep grazed on the hill, the geese honked and prepared to fight with any and all who came near their domain, and we took time out to eat sandwiches, holding them with our blood-caked fingers, all while a cluster of chickens, having joined the dogs, searched for scraps at our feet.

A few days later I loaded up my truck with the hog on ice and left home to go home. Over the years I’ve given the act of going and coming much thought. I have decided that it is a bit like having dual citizenship. When I return to Louisiana, home of my birth, the act of going does not really begin until I cross water. It’s not when I pull down the long gravel driveway and leave the farm, nor when I traverse Alabama or Mississippi. It’s when I cross The River. The mighty Mississippi, which is just that, a massive current of water, awe-inspiring yet frightening in its single-minded push toward the Gulf of Mexico.

This particular morning, I made the crossing between Natchez, Mississippi, and Vidalia, Louisiana. From the top of the twin cantilevered bridges, the cotton fields of Concordia Parish spread out far to the west. Below, the ghost of Harlan Hubbard navigated the wild currents in his shantyboat, dodging the heavy barge traffic on the broad river. Now I roll down my windows as Jerry Lee belts out the live version of “What I’d Say”over my truck speakers, and I suck in a lungful of thick Delta air. It tastes of home. Pulling off the bridge onto Highway 15, I give a respectful nod to The Killer a few miles north of here, where he takes his final rest in a Ferriday cemetery, before I turn the wheels south toward the heart of Acadiana.

The real Louisiana is a shrouded place. It’s often hard to glimpse if you are blind to seeing. But if your eyes are open, you will discover that the veil is slightly parted on the present culture, revealing instructive (albeit unfashionable) vignettes to older modes of living. While there is plenty of modern commerce and industry, there are also a people and a lifestyle that remain essentially rooted in a rich past. And while there are still agrarian echoes of the authentic South in scattered pockets, it is only when you cross The River that you find them concentrated in an almost undiluted form in this still slow-to-change world. It is of no small importance that Louisianans have the lowest outward migration in any of the 50 states. And even when they do leave, they still remain, as do I.

I often find it hard to convey to non-natives of the Bayou State what a real food culture is like, one where eating amazing food is as natural as a breath or a heartbeat. It has often been said that the native of Louisiana is not focused on the next meal but already planning what to eat the following weekend—where to catch, trap, or shoot it, and most important, whom to share it with. Because the true heart of Louisiana is found at a table of family, friends, or even perfect strangers eating the bounty of the soil and waters from this most generous land as they sit cheek to jowl under an oak tree next to a gas station or convenience store parking lot.

That is where I find myself around lunchtime, at a no-name crossroads convenience store just east of Simmesport. I pull into a parking lot packed with duck and deer hunters, pickup trucks, and boat trailers. The all-male, camouflage-clothed clientele are keeping the friendly ladies behind the counter busy placing orders for plates of jambalaya, bowls of gumbo, and fried chicken platters. I drift almost without thinking into the line. Even though I have only stopped to take a leak and pick up fresh ice to put on the hog, a bowl of jambalaya finds its way into my hands, and I go back out into the warm day. I squeeze onto a long picnic table with the assorted hunters. Each clutches a noonday longneck in one hand and a fork or spoon in the other. I eat my lunch and listen to their stories of the morning. Some are sharing tips on the best ways to prepare a duck gumbo, others about the best processors for smoked venison sausages. In East Tennessee, men shoot deer and gather at Hardee’s to talk. Yet they seldom express much enthusiasm for eating. No wonder, when what they share are only dreary recipes for venison chili or jerky. (This is a truth that is pointless to dispute.) Which is another thing that sets my birthplace apart: its population of working-class men are obsessed with good food, how to get it, and how to best prepare it … so very French in its values, not just in its appreciation of great eating but in all things.

To my knowledge, there is no other state that has guidebooks and websites devoted to the best “real” food to be found at gas stations. Running a successful gas station in rural Louisiana includes providing good food; the man who ignores the mandate doesn’t stay in business. That is Louisiana. Outsiders may describe it as Cancer Alley, a flood zone, a hurricane either on the way or just arrived, or, God forbid, by the reductionist “Oh, New Orleans, I love it!” But if asked what home means, a native Louisianan is most likely to say it’s a table covered in newspapers upon which is dumped a massive pile of boiled crawfish or crabs, to be served alongside potatoes and corn on the cob. Staying up until midnight shucking 500 pounds of oysters. Duck hunting on the marsh at sunrise Thanksgiving Day, making sure you’re back home in time to be clean and ready for the feast at 2 p.m. Being a Louisianan means it’s 7 a.m. and you’re already five miles off the coast fishing for ling, a true roast beef po-boy with 20 napkins still not enough, a truck stop diner serving chicken sausage gumbo, a cochon de lait out on a levee. A Pentecostal church social that serves up jambalaya prepared in a 50-gallon cast iron pot and that all denominations show up to support. A Baptist picnic under 300-year-old live oaks with endless tables of food, including, and always, massive platters of dirty rice. But most important, it is almost never a restaurant dinner. It is, at its most fundamental, about sharing food with family and neighbors.

A trip to my home state doesn’t need signposts. If you are surrounded by pine forests, you know you are in the northern hill parishes, where my uncle Burl once told my uncle Al, “Nothing grows here but timber and babies.” If the road winds among rivers and endless bayous dotted with small villages, each with a Catholic church at its center, you know you are in Acadiana. Old, ruined plantations tucked among oil refineries that loom next to The River? Then you are between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The Midwestern landscape of flatness, impossibly straight roads, and endless rice fields interspersed by sleepy, sluggish bayous? Now you’ve arrived in my home territory of Southwest Louisiana. You are at the place where Jean Lafitte’s men raided my fourth great-grandfather’s home, on September 27, 1819, up on Bayou Queue de Tortue—an event that precipitated a chase by the USS Lynx to recover stolen slaves and resulted in capturing the pirates in Galveston Bay and hanging them in New Orleans before a public audience.

But wherever you find yourself in this state, you are always near good food and a cold frozen daiquiri stand. Because in Louisiana, the laws on and enforcement of alcohol consumption are somewhat befuddled with a Bacchanalian impulse toward legislation. (This is a state where it used to be legal to drive while drinking, just not drunk, which was an odd but somehow important and civilized distinction for the lawmakers, possibly in an act of self-preservation, to insist on codifying.)

My destination on this particular journey south is Chicot State Park, just outside of Ville Platte. I’m heading to the annual gathering of the men in my family. My path takes me past Lecompte, home to Lea’s Lunchroom, a landmark enshrined in my family lore not for its dozens of pies on display but for the visit circa 1930 when my mother’s older sister danced the Charleston as a little girl, to the amusement of family and the other diners. That this aunt later became the most severe tempered of Baptists made the image of her performing even more one to cherish.

Early afternoon I pull into Ville Platte, not far from where my high school father walked out of the woods with a buddy after a week of fishing, flagged down a truck for a ride back to town, and was informed that the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor. Coming home is like that: the memories are as thick as the fields of sugarcane around me, planted among a landscape of cypress trees along winding bayous, rich rice fields and pecan orchards, all teeming with my ancestors, who walk among and out of mists as densely storied and historied as any in the country.

I load up at Teet’s, a grocery and specialty meat store of long standing (1955), with the essentials for our weekend — mustard greens, boudin, tasso, ponce (stuffed pig stomach), bacon, beer, wine, and coffee. The truck overloaded, I head to a remote cabin sheltered in an old-growth forest alongside Chicot Lake, where I sensibly take a nap to await my kin.

The husband of a niece is the first to arrive. A young ex-marine with a quiet, solemn mien, he helps me get things squared away while we wait on the others. Late afternoon I begin cutting the onions for the big pot before sautéing them in half a stick of butter alongside a quarter pound of smoked bacon. While the onions and bacon cook down, the two of us rinse and chop a grocery bag full of mustard greens, then toss them into the mix. A few chunks of tasso (spicy cured pork), a quart of water, plenty of Tony Chachere’s seasoning, and the lidded pot is left to simmer for the next few hours.

Back when there was still a South, before it began dying a slow and undeserved death with the invention of air conditioning, you could know where a boy was from by the greens he ate. There was a collard belt, a turnip belt, and a mustard greens belt. Louisiana fell mostly in the latter. My father, shortly before he died at 94, was posed the question, “Dad, what are your favorite greens to eat?” ”Mustard greens” was his prompt and correct reply. Some of the newcomers to the region, who in the far-off times of a decade ago would have been called Yankees, propose kale and bok choy as fair greens substitutes. But if a green cannot be improved by long simmering in pork products, then we Southerners don’t want it on our table.

While the greens simmer and everyone else arrives, while beer is drunk, a nephew and his son prepare venison backstraps and loins for the grill. They have shot two bucks the previous morning and have brought the best cuts to share.

We gather around the table as the sun sets. A younger brother gives the blessing, I give the toast, and we dig into bowls of greens, links of boudin, and blood-rare slices of seasoned venison, all washed down by cold beer from a local brewery. Once we’re done cleaning up, we retire outside to sit by a fire. A few of us smoke cigars, and bourbon and scotch make the rounds. We catch up on family gossip, share family history, talk sports, regale one another with hunting stories, make fun of those who couldn’t make the get-together.

After a hearty breakfast the following morning, we put the hog in the smoker. Come afternoon, we gather around the TV to watch LSU get destroyed by Georgia, giving us a chance to exchange classic game-day stories. Such as the one about the time our maternal grandparents took three ferries in the 1920s across the Atchafalaya Basin and the Mississippi just to watch LSU beat Alabama. Or the one about the letter we have all read from my 18-year-old father to his mother when he was on a destroyer anchored off Iwo Jima (a few months after the battle), in which he asks two things: first, could she send him his trigonometry book so he could bone up, and second, could she mail him the newspaper articles that covered the LSU vs. Alabama game?

Meanwhile, outside, slumbering under the coals, with skin crackling, the pork roasts on as the heat works its lovely magic. A pig roast, like a crawfish boil, is a communal event. It is a call to gather the extended family, bring the neighbors, help share in the bounty. Pig meat is accessible and democratic. We can all eat “high on the hog” with pork, because a pig is easily raised by anyone with the tiniest of rural patches. Flora Thompson writes in Lark Rise to Candleford of small children gathering choice thistle and grasses during the day to feed the family pig. Everyone took part in the yearlong domestic project to fatten the animal so that all could enjoy the sausage, flitches of bacon, salted hams, head cheese, chops, loin, and blood puddings. A pig in the paddock says “We can survive, do for ourselves” and “Bring on the worst—you can’t touch us.” Pull up an overturned bucket, hunker down, and watch a cow eat hay and you feel nothing. Watch a pig tuck into a trough of steamed zucchini, corn, and stale bread and you shout “Comrade!” even as you plot his betrayal.

Around halftime we take a grateful break from the shellacking to indulge in the pulled-apart roasted hog (soused in a Carolina vinegar sauce), accompanied by corn on the cob, beans, and more links of boudin. With the lot of us sitting before a table full of porky goodness, my elder brother gives the blessing and we drink more beer and eat to gluttony. Mercifully the game finally ends, and we do that most manly of things on a Saturday afternoon: we all take a nap.

The next morning I am on the road by five o’clock, headed for home in East Tennessee, with 10 hours before me. The remains of the hog have been dispersed to the younger nephews. My cooler is again loaded, this time with pounds of boudin, tasso, ponce, and various other essentials that make an expat’s life bearable through the grief of nostalgia and hunger.

Late in the evening I pull onto the drive of the farm I also call home. Having now spent many more years in East Tennessee than in Southwest Louisiana, I have an adaptable notion of what homecoming means. The farm, which I work and enjoy with Cindy, my beloved, is a homeplace in every sense of the word that matters. Yet it is only mine and her life that I see reflected in its landscape. It is a different sort of homecoming than that to be had from revisiting the land my family has nurtured for 250 years, in life and in death.

* Author’s Note: “Hot boudin, cold coush- coush, / Come on Tigers, push, push push!” Is a very old cheer that most Louisiana sports teams use, substituting their own mascot for “Tigers.” Coush-coush is fried leftover cornbread served with cream and syrup. And, dear God, if someone doesn’t know what boudin is, or has never eaten it—well, that person is only be pitied.

Lessons From My Father

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Dad listening to the music at our annual gathering of the men in the family.

Character, as it turns out, is important. It matters much more how a life is lived than how it is materially clothed. Since my father’s passing two years ago, I have often reflected on what lessons he taught by example. He was a quiet man, not given to verbal instruction. But he had plenty to teach, if one paid attention, as I hope I did.

On showing up: On Saturday afternoon or a weekday night, my father would put his suit on, knot his tie, and head to a visitation or a funeral. When you have lived in the same modest city for a lifetime, worked the same job, attended the same church, you are part of a fabric. When that fabric gets torn, part of it is lost. That’s when you show up and pay your respects. Wear your suit and say your condolences.

On being the calm voice: I have heard variations of the same story my whole life. In one, a water main on the jobsite is ruptured by a careless backhoe operator, shutting off water to an entire town. The crew members are yelling and pointing fingers of blame. That’s when “Mr. Bill” shows up. He quietly directs everyone to a solution and repair. In the 59 years I knew him, I do not recall my father ever raising his voice. I’m sure it happened; he was certainly firm. But it wasn’t in his DNA to engage in a blame game. Stay calm and get on with fixing the problem at hand.

On knowing when to help: My father, after I left home, never offered me assistance (other than a $500 loan, which I was expected to and did pay back). With some other family members he stepped in, signed co-loans, and covered possible catastrophic life events. I puzzled over this, was even resentful, as a young man. As I have grown older, I’ve come to understand more of his unspoken rationale. In his world view, most need to make their way in life and can take care of themselves. Others need a helping hand, and he was prepared to offer it. Wisdom lies in knowing who benefits from help and who is harmed by it.

On trusting in yourself: My father never raised his voice or prattled on … about anything. He had opinions, which were voiced quietly (although often one had to read the tea leaves carefully to know where he stood). His was an old-fashioned quality that allowed one to rub shoulders, not throw elbows, within a larger community. Know who you are and what you stand for; there is no need to shout about it.

On stepping up: Whether as a member of countless social organizations, a deacon or trustee at church, or a visitor of shut-ins, he always showed up and contributed in the endless tasks of the volunteer. Be there, get things done, and expect to do it without recognition.

On being loyal: Here is how it works. Go to work every day after school at a brick factory to support your mom, volunteer to serve in World War II, use the GI Bill to go to college, and get out and work for the same company until you are 80. Stay at the same church, stay married, and stay in the same house. Sit by your wife’s side every afternoon for 10 years, holding her hand as she fades away. Be a sticker, not a boomer.

At his death, my father was not famous or rich. Yet, in the life he led he had wealth of character. In the final accounting that is more than sufficient. “What would Bill do?” is the essential question this son often asks himself.

Couzain!

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Russell Mathis

My cousin Rusty Mathis passed away this week, 10 days after going into cardiac arrest. Rusty was a big, tall man in all ways by which we measure, and certainly in all ways that matter most. He was older than me by some years and, as such, always around on the big days of childhood, the holidays and birthdays. Some of my earliest memories are of the two of us and my older brother sitting on the bedroom floor of the Mathis home in Beaumont, Texas, probably on a Christmas Eve, refighting the Battle of Gettysburg with those blue and gray figurines that all Southern boys had in those far off and unenlightened days.

The attentive reader of this blog may note that this cousin has made an appearance in my recollections many times, as an avid gardener, a man of faith, and a linchpin of his community. Rusty was the one who, in the midst of negotiations with executives from a Northeastern city, stopped them cold when said, “We may have to lick the calf twice.” It took a bit of explaining to get at what he meant — you may not succeed the first time, but try again — but once understood, the businessmen took to the expression right away and started weaving it into their own communications.

Although Rusty grew up and spent his life in that gritty industrial city on the Gulf Coast, most weekends found he and his father hunting squirrels with their Catahoulas or raising cattle on their property up in the Big Thicket along the Sabine River. When pressed by Rusty’s mother for why they were always going out of town, his father once told my Aunt Cille, “Cille, you can’t raise a boy on a 50-foot-square lot.”

I spent a lot of time learning to dig postholes on that land as a boy. Now, in my full maturity, I’m beginning to suspect that, as Rusty was a devoted reader of Mark Twain, there was more than a bit of the “Aunt Polly is mighty particular about how this fence gets painted” to the “opportunity” I was given.

Rusty had the Will Rogers gift of the natural-born American humorist: he told long and slow (and believe me, my cousin spoke in long and slow sentences), but always with great purpose and often incredibly funny, stories. He and I, as adulthood often does, fell out of contact for a long period, until the aging of parents, a shared aunt, and the loss of my sister brought us close again. He and his wife, Rosemary, visited the farm often these past years.

One of the first times I met Rosemary, a pretty, tall, skinny girl from Port Arthur, Rusty told me she had a tapeworm. I believed him, as a gullible youngster, and to the great amusement of family wide and large, I indiscreetly repeated her “problem.” That was my cousin, my “Couzain!” as he always called me. He had a sly and targeted humor that belied an active and keen intelligence, as well as a gentle, easygoing speaking voice that was matched by a startling, beautiful singing voice.

Rusty, who was adopted as an infant, made family central to his life. From his parents to his wife and children, from his extended cousins to the assorted half-siblings he discovered late in life, from his hometown of Beaumont to the whole damn state of Texas — the way I sensed it, they were all encompassed in his idea of kith and kin. He had the firmest notion of place of anyone of my acquaintance.

When we lose anyone in this world, there is a void left. But lest we dip into some dreary relativism, let us acknowledge that some are mourned more than others, some leave bigger gaps in the ranks of those left behind. As my cousin lingered these past 10 days before his death, it was clear he was of the latter company. The hundreds and hundreds of outpourings of love from family, friends, church, his city, and way beyond were both evidence and lessons in how to live well, how to be a better man.

We all leave this world at some juncture. To leave respected, valued, and loved, as Rusty was, is the lesson I take to heart. His was the life well spent. Another decade more, another decade less wouldn’t change that trajectory.

Farewell, Couzain!