Glenmora and the Farm

If you happen to find yourself in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, and have some time to kill, drive half an hour south through Woodworth and Forest Hill and you’ll reach a tiny little hamlet called Glenmora.

It’s one of a diminishing number of small towns in rural America—sort of like Mayberry from the Andy Griffith Show but with more seafood. It’s a small, close-knit community of good people with good hearts, where you can leave your door unlocked at night if you leave the house and never worry about someone breaking in. It’s nestled in the green embrace of the Kisatchie National Forest, surrounded on all sides by majestic thick woods and groves of magnificent oak trees, and if you want to go exploring, all you’ve got to do is walk off the beaten path and keep walking. In a world that’s moving ever-faster and growing more connected by the day, Glenmora offers something that’s becoming harder and harder to find: a sense of slowness, of solitary peace and wonderful disconnection from the troubles of the wider world.

The town of Glenmora proper is so tiny that you might blink and drive right past it. There’s the post office, the Sheriff’s office—I think Glenmora might have about five cops total—the flea market, the bank and a restaurant called Fuzzie’s Hamburgers. If you have the opportunity to stop and eat there, do it. Fuzzie’s has the best damn cheeseburgers in the Western hemisphere, I swear to God. Their sign advertises “Good ol’ home cookin’” and that’s exactly what they’ll give you. I’ve been going there to eat ever since I was a little kid, and both their food and service have never been lacking. Mr. Bobby runs the town’s only barber shop, and he’s been cutting my hair since I was old enough to need haircuts at all. He’s a tall man, with snowy-white hair and a magnificent handlebar moustache—and a maestro with a pair of scissors in his hand. He takes both walk-ins and appointments if you’re interested, and so does Norma Jean, who runs the women’s salon across the street. She and Mr. Bobby have been having a friendly competition going on for more than twenty years—and the question of who’s the better barber has yet to be decided. The last place of real note is Amiable Baptist Church. It services a large part of Glenmora’s residents and also happens to be the third oldest church west of the Mississippi River. It was founded early in the nineteenth century by some of Glenmora’s first residents and its cemetery, located not far from the grounds, has gravestones dating back almost two centuries. Not a long time by European standards, perhaps, but it’s certainly a long time when the U.S. itself is only two hundred and forty years old. The pastor there is brother Benjamin “Benji” Rhame, for whom I have the highest respect because he heads not only the church, but also runs several local charities, lets homeless people, drug addicts and alcoholics stay at his house when they have nowhere else to go, and frequently goes and brings food to those in need---food that he pays for out of his own pocket. He doesn’t just talk about Christian charity. He lives it.

Now, if you drive past Amiable for about five minutes you should see a turn on your right where the road slopes downward a bit. Drive down that road for about a minute and a half (Richmond Road, so it’s called) and you’ll be at my grandparents’ place. You’ll know it when you see it because it’s got a sign saying “Lonsberry Farm” out by the driveway, and that’s what we call the place: the farm. I suppose we could have thought of something a little more original, but we’ve been calling it by that name for so long that we don’t have the heart to change it. The farm isn’t actually a functioning farm anymore, although it used to be. Nowadays it’s sort of like a country retreat, a small piece of land consisting of about a hundred acres of woods, forests and streams. The property was first acquired by my great-grandma’s grandfather in 1916, so it’s been in our family for exactly one hundred years. The Lonsberry family itself--my mother's family--has been in Louisiana for at least twice that long, since before the Civil War.

And the farm is…magical.

That sounds stupid, I know, but it really is. The house sits on a hill, with its back porch overlooking three huge green pastures where we harvest hay and graze horses and cattle, and beyond that is a treeline that stretches as far as the eye can see. The front porch looks out over the driveway and the road, and that’s not a bad spot to sit either because we’ve got a huge rose garden and—my favorite of all—a massive old three-topped oak tree in front of the house, with a canopy so wide that it almost reaches the end of the drive. We don’t know how old that tree is, but we do know that it was here when we first got it, so it’s got at least a century under its belt. If you don’t want to relax in a chair, there’s plenty of other stuff to do. Head out from the back porch and into the woods, turn left when you see Grandad’s deer blind and keeping walking, and you’ll eventually come to Spring Creek, which is good for fishing and swimming all year round. If it’s summer, then nine times out of ten you might run into the Hunt boys. The Hunts are our closest neighbors, and they’ve been friends of ours for so long that they’re practically family. Mr. Hunt and my grandfather go back more than twenty years, and although the head of the Hunt family must be pushing seventy at least, he seems as strong as someone in his forties (likely due to his adamantium skeleton and Wolverine regeneration powers). He can break a horse and charm a lamb away from its mother with equal skill. If anyone can be called a man’s man, it’s him—and while he and his boys can be a tad rambunctious when they want to have fun, they’re some of the warmest people I know. In June and July we’ll also have blueberries for the picking because we’ve got blueberry bushes right on the property in huge groves, and on a good year those bushes will be so heavy with nature’s bounty that their branches will almost touch the ground.

Anyway, when you step out of your car, chances are you’ll see my grandfather himself sitting in his favorite armchair—I say armchair and not a rocking chair, because he claims the stiff wooden backs on rocking chairs make it impossible for him to take naps. Grandad is one of the last real Southern gentleman; in twenty five years of life, I have never once seen him raise his voice, lose his temper or say as much as a discouraging word to anybody. The man doesn’t have a single mean bone in him, and that’s the Lord’s truth. His voice is like distant rumbling thunder, deep and heavy with the slow drawl of the Old South—it’s almost like listening to a movie when you hear him speak, which you probably will because it’s a safe bet that he’ll invite you inside for a bite to eat and something to drink. And there’s always something to eat at the farm: there’s always fresh pound cake on the counter and fresh homemade vanilla ice cream in the freezer whenever someone wants a snack, and if the blueberry harvest is done, we’ll have blueberry everything: blueberry waffles, blueberry pancakes, blueberry ice cream, blueberry syrup, blueberry jam, even blueberry lemonade. And it’s all free of charge, courtesy of my grandmother, Barbara Lonsberry, who can play a kitchen the way Mozart played the piano. Her muffins, in particular, are absolutely to die for, as well as her world-famous crawfish etouffee and sweet banana bread, which she always bakes with slices of real bananas. I’ve called her Grammie for as long as I can remember, and like Grandad she’s got an old Southern accent—but where Grandad’s is deep and rumbly, Grammie’s voice is more like the fairy godmother from Cinderella with a Gone with the Wind accent. That also sums up her personality, too. She’s plump, matronly and utterly sweet-natured—one of the nicest, sweetest and most caring people you’ll ever meet in your life, and that’s putting it mildly. I…I really can’t put into words how wonderful she is. She’d give you her last dollar if you asked for it, and you can take that to the bank. She has a stunning singing voice, too, and she often sings in church, especially on Christmas. Happily, both she and Grandad are doing rather well for people in their early eighties, they’re in robust health. They can drive and walk unaided, and in general they’re probably doing better than a lot of folks their age. I would count myself blessed if my body is working that well at eighty-one.

The farm is a microcosm of Glenmora itself: wonderfully isolated, stunningly beautiful, and serenely—almost ethereally—peaceful. Its magic—and I use that word because no other will suffice—isn’t supernatural. It comes from the people, from the town, from the memories and from what it’s come to mean and symbolize to me.

The Elves of Middle-Earth had Rivendell, Peter Pan had Neverland, the Pevensie children had Narnia, and I have the farm. It’s my sanctuary, my special place, where I can go and just chill for a while. My childhood was not a very happy one, but what happy memories I do have were made there. I still treasure the memory of those long summer days when my twin sister and I would go exploring in the woods, or swim in the creek, or pick the blueberries in summer and see who could fit the most in a single bucket. Outside of school I had a pretty fucking epic childhood—and I credit that to the farm and to Holly in equal parts. We would go down into the barn or into the woods and just create entire worlds playing make-believe, and when the time came to come inside for dinner Grammie would ring the cow bell. We waged epic battle against each other armed with Nerf guns and Super-soakers, pulled pranks, rode horses and watched Grandad work in his tool shed. Sometimes, if Grandad had to use the tractor, he’d let us sit in his lap while he drove. I always loved riding on the tractor. Then in the evening I would go to sleep—and still do—listening to the crickets and frogs and cicadas outside, and on a clear night you can see the stars in the sky so clearly that the sight takes your breath away.

It's all so...perfect.

The farm is so, so heavy with so many memories, and almost all of them are good ones. The best parts of my life, the best part of me, took shape there. Go outside and you know what you’ll hear? You won’t hear cars or trucks or airplanes. You’ll hear the mockingbirds and bluejays tweeting, the crows cawing, cows lowing and horses neighing. You’ll hear Oso and Boo, our two Labradors, snoring gently in their favorite spot in the sun. And then you feel that sense of sublime peace, as though time itself has slowed to a crawl or stopped entirely, and you wish nothing more than to curl up with a good book and an ice-cold glass of milk and let the world pass you by. When I am at the farm, I feel…whole. And whenever I leave, I leave feeling rejuvenated not only in body but also in soul. But I always come back. I cannot help but come back. I need to come back. If ever I am able, I hope to retire there and live the rest of my life beneath the swaying trees, surrounded by the hills and meadows and streams I’ve come to know so well. I don’t think words alone will ever be enough to describe how I feel about it, or how deep those feelings run.

If home truly is where the heart is, then my home is the farm. Even New Orleans, so near and dear to my heart, cannot compare. I have a house in New Orleans, but my home is a magical place on a hill in the Kisatchie National Forest, where there’s always good food to eat and the weather is always warm and the sun’s always shining and the meadows are seas of green.