Read Online The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life by Rod Dreher - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Rod Dreher
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Starhill with them.
Within a month of John’s relocating to West Feliciana, his father died. His mother chose to remain in Baton Rouge to be close to her church. At the time John, who worked with the fire department at the Exxon refinery in north Baton Rouge, also served on the Starhill Volunteer Fire Department. That’s how he got to know Paw. In his grief over his father’s loss, John drew close to the older man.
John saw that keeping up Paw’s barn, mowing the grass around the pond and Paw’s pastures, and maintaining the tractors, was too much work for Mike to handle alone. So he pitched in. Besides John enjoyed working alongside Paw, even as age and infirmity diminished Paw’s ability to do for himself.
As Big Show and John, both deer hunters, found out, to be part of Mam and Paw’s circle is to gain access to good hunting grounds on Paw’s fifty acres. It also meant access to the bass, bream, and catfish in the pond. Hunting and fishing in “the Back,” as we called it in our family, was a passion for Ruthie that lasted past childhood.
“She always wanted to go fishing,” Mike says. “She would go buy crickets, or she liked to use a plastic worm. She’d fix lunch, and drinks, and we’d just go to the pond. Because she loved hunting and fishing so much, she never begrudged me a chance to go off somewhere with my friends to do it.”
It’s not uncommon for women raised in West Feliciana to accustom themselves to their husbands’ hunting and fishing habits. It is less common for them to share those interests. And then there was the way Ruthie did it.
When Mike killed a deer, Ruthie dashed to the skinning rack in Paw’s barn to clean the deer herself. She wasn’t content simply to slice the hide off the deer’s carcass and butcher it. She approached the task like an amateur forensic scientist, examining the deer’s entrails for clues.
When Mike came in from a fishing trip, Ruthie instructed him to leave the stringer of slimy fish in the kitchen sink for her to take care of. She would whip out her electric knife, gut the fish, debone them, and freeze the fillets or prepare them straightaway for dinner. If the girls were around, she would enlist their help, and take the opportunity to give them a biology lesson about fish anatomy. Mike’s buddies found it hard to believe that his wife not only gave him no guff for stinking up her kitchen with fish, but that she also demanded to process them herself.
In fact it’s hard to overestimate the part fishing, especially on Paw’s pond, played in the Leming family’s life. “When did we start going to the pond? Well, how old are you when you start walking?” Claire Leming, now a teenager, asks rhetorically.
Fun for the Lemings often meant summer afternoons down at Thompson Creek, near Ronnie Morgan’s camp. They call it the Starhill Riviera. Ronnie is a longtime neighbor and contemporary of my parents, but perpetually youthful in his crackpot joie de vivre. With a heart as big as his head is bald, Ronnie is the kind of good ol’ boy who lives perpetually poised between his third beer and the question, “Hell, what could it hurt?” As Starhill’s version of Jimmy Buffett by way of Hunter S. Thompson, he would get the Margaritaville vibe going down at his camp in the late afternoon. Ronnie cooked potluck—gumbo, jambalaya—and all you had to bring was cold beer, a bottle of whiskey, and, if you liked, something to put in the pot. In cool weather, folks would build a bonfire. David Morgan, Ronnie’s son and a country singer and guitarist, would play solo, or sometimes get his band together. Starhill danced. That was a Louisiana Saturday night.
“All the kids would be playing outside, and nobody would care,” Hannah says. “It was a carefree life. Nothing but good times and good friends.” The sisters remembered too how affectionate their mother and father were with each other. When Mike would work an overnightshift at the fire station,
Within a month of John’s relocating to West Feliciana, his father died. His mother chose to remain in Baton Rouge to be close to her church. At the time John, who worked with the fire department at the Exxon refinery in north Baton Rouge, also served on the Starhill Volunteer Fire Department. That’s how he got to know Paw. In his grief over his father’s loss, John drew close to the older man.
John saw that keeping up Paw’s barn, mowing the grass around the pond and Paw’s pastures, and maintaining the tractors, was too much work for Mike to handle alone. So he pitched in. Besides John enjoyed working alongside Paw, even as age and infirmity diminished Paw’s ability to do for himself.
As Big Show and John, both deer hunters, found out, to be part of Mam and Paw’s circle is to gain access to good hunting grounds on Paw’s fifty acres. It also meant access to the bass, bream, and catfish in the pond. Hunting and fishing in “the Back,” as we called it in our family, was a passion for Ruthie that lasted past childhood.
“She always wanted to go fishing,” Mike says. “She would go buy crickets, or she liked to use a plastic worm. She’d fix lunch, and drinks, and we’d just go to the pond. Because she loved hunting and fishing so much, she never begrudged me a chance to go off somewhere with my friends to do it.”
It’s not uncommon for women raised in West Feliciana to accustom themselves to their husbands’ hunting and fishing habits. It is less common for them to share those interests. And then there was the way Ruthie did it.
When Mike killed a deer, Ruthie dashed to the skinning rack in Paw’s barn to clean the deer herself. She wasn’t content simply to slice the hide off the deer’s carcass and butcher it. She approached the task like an amateur forensic scientist, examining the deer’s entrails for clues.
When Mike came in from a fishing trip, Ruthie instructed him to leave the stringer of slimy fish in the kitchen sink for her to take care of. She would whip out her electric knife, gut the fish, debone them, and freeze the fillets or prepare them straightaway for dinner. If the girls were around, she would enlist their help, and take the opportunity to give them a biology lesson about fish anatomy. Mike’s buddies found it hard to believe that his wife not only gave him no guff for stinking up her kitchen with fish, but that she also demanded to process them herself.
In fact it’s hard to overestimate the part fishing, especially on Paw’s pond, played in the Leming family’s life. “When did we start going to the pond? Well, how old are you when you start walking?” Claire Leming, now a teenager, asks rhetorically.
Fun for the Lemings often meant summer afternoons down at Thompson Creek, near Ronnie Morgan’s camp. They call it the Starhill Riviera. Ronnie is a longtime neighbor and contemporary of my parents, but perpetually youthful in his crackpot joie de vivre. With a heart as big as his head is bald, Ronnie is the kind of good ol’ boy who lives perpetually poised between his third beer and the question, “Hell, what could it hurt?” As Starhill’s version of Jimmy Buffett by way of Hunter S. Thompson, he would get the Margaritaville vibe going down at his camp in the late afternoon. Ronnie cooked potluck—gumbo, jambalaya—and all you had to bring was cold beer, a bottle of whiskey, and, if you liked, something to put in the pot. In cool weather, folks would build a bonfire. David Morgan, Ronnie’s son and a country singer and guitarist, would play solo, or sometimes get his band together. Starhill danced. That was a Louisiana Saturday night.
“All the kids would be playing outside, and nobody would care,” Hannah says. “It was a carefree life. Nothing but good times and good friends.” The sisters remembered too how affectionate their mother and father were with each other. When Mike would work an overnightshift at the fire station,
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