Bloom Where You Are Planted

Reflections

Bloom Where You Are Planted

Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

I’m writing this perched in a lawn chair in the parking lot of a Lafayette high school, where we’re waiting to watch our youngest child, a senior, defend West Feliciana High School’s honor in the regional finals of the 2023 LHSAA Tennis Tournament. It’s a cool, breezy April Monday, and for Charles, who has arrived at the pointy end of his high school journey, this is tennis-playing, finals-cramming, college-choosing, prom date-inviting weather. But the end is near; at this point, I think Charles only has to show up about three more times before his thirteen-year run in the West Feliciana Parish school system comes to an end. I’m proud to announce that this fall, he’ll start college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, leaving his parents in the unfamiliar position of having no children at home for the first time in two decades. Twenty years is both a long time and a shockingly short one, and it’s difficult not to dwell on the end of this monumental season of our lives.

Milestones have a way of making you take stock of your surroundings, and lately we’ve found ourselves reflecting on what has changed in ours during this parenting journey, and what has stayed the same. One that belongs in both categories is our hometown, which seems to be having a bit of a moment. In March Southern Living magazine named St. Francisville one of its “50 Best Towns in the South for 2023,” joining the travel/ destination website Far & Wide, which included St. Francisville in its “America’s Coolest Small Towns by State” list in January. A flurry of new businesses—from restaurants to clothing boutiques—have either opened recently or are working feverishly to do so. Brandon Branch and Jim Johnson have bought the venerable Barrow House bed & breakfast, with plans to reopen it as a threeroom inn named The Royal before the year is out. At the other end of Ferdinand Street, a different sort of St. Francisville landmark, The Oyster Bar, is open again, serving beers and tempting fate with zero regard for the rising river water creeping across the parking lot. Perhaps most exciting now that my year on the wagon is behind me: long-awaited Bayou Sara Brewing Company is set to break ground in the old Bennett Ford building next month. At risk of stretching the high school analogy to breaking point, if St. Francisville were graduating this spring, it would either win the “Most Popular,” or “Most Likely to Succeed” awards. Or possibly both.

Of course, as things grow, other things go. At the end of 2022, Grandmother’s Buttons closed the book on its astonishing, thirty-seven-year run (which you can hear us talk to founder Susan Davis about in Episode 2 of Country Roads’ new DETOURS podcast). Lynn Wood is no longer a morning fixture at Birdman Coffee & Books, having passed the torch to her niece, Lexi. And enough new residents have been drawn by West Feliciana’s fresh energy and outstanding school system that familiar fields and woods are starting to be replaced by new construction (for the first time in 120 years we have neighbors!).

For our kids, born, raised, and launched from here, St. Francisville has been a charmed place to call home. When they were small, the woods and streams of rural West Feliciana supplied a canvas for unfettered exploration. As they navigated adolescence, the closeknit community and excellent public school system provided a many-layered support structure that challenged and socialized them while holding them to high standards. And as they got drivers’ licenses and tried on the trappings of early adulthood, the town made space, provided mentors and first jobs, then wished them luck and waved them on their way. No matter how and where you grow up, a near-universal coming-ofage mantra seems to involve wanting to get out of dodge. So, now that Charles stands on the verge of leaving for college, the fact that he can’t stop talking about how much he loves St. Francisville surely counts for something.

One day about twenty-eight years ago, shortly after moving to St. Francisville from a city of four million, and still feeling very much like a fish out of water, I went to the tiny West Feliciana community of Weyanoke to interview a legendary ceramic artist named Michael Miller for one of my first Country Roads articles. A weather-beaten, unrepentant hippie with a pecan wood-fired kiln and a wooden leg, Michael had traveled far and wide, spending much of the sixties and seventies in California before returning to West Feliciana to establish Air House Pottery. After showing me around his studio and patiently answering my naïve questions for an hour or so, Michael gently asked how I was finding life in a small town. When I admitted that it was taking some getting used to, he fastened me with his twinkling blue eyes, smiled, and said “Bloom where you’re planted, man, and you’ll be fine.”

Best advice I ever got.