Bayou Teche runs not far alongside us for most of our drive from Lafayette to Morgan City. We’re on what is the old Highway 90, the Old Spanish Trail. We drive through Broussard. New Iberia. Jeanerette. Franklin. Baldwin.

These towns remind me of how Lafayette was when I was a girl. The lovely somnolent pace. Tremendous oaks. Straight 2-lane roads bordered by fields and scattered houses. White clouds blooming against blue blue sky. You can see far across the fields.

Azaleas are in full bloom—great bursts of coral, white, pale pink, the traditional hot pink. They transform even the most modest of houses into grandeur. We pass middle schools and high schools in each town--places from which kids might ride bikes, or pull out in their first cars without much risk of damage. School stadiums surrounded by nothing but field. Signs proclaiming Home of the Fighting Hornets. One tall brick Catholic church in each town. I suspect their doors are not locked.

Stores sell First Communion dresses, Confirmation gifts. Place after place boasts live or boiled crawfish, seafood. Architecture is so distinctively local--the white houses whose verandas have ceiling fans and the low brick houses that hug the earth. The tall red brick stacks of sugar mills, mostly in disuse now. And the metal industrial buildings of businesses selling petroleum related services and equipment. Somehow, it all works together.

Three men of many years share a bench under the cover of an old gas station roof. A pale Labrador at their feet. On an old side porch, a slender woman with short grey hair wears a red dress, drinks Coke from a traditional glass bottle in her graceful hand. The brown quiet water of Bayou Teche, so flat and broad, makes its way to the gulf. The bayou was a source of food and transportation for all those pre-industrial years.

Sometimes, you have to go away to see where you come from. The roots of what stillness resides in me are intertwined with the curves of the quiet bayou and the roots of the oaks that grace this part of the planet.