Enchanted Evening Barbie and The Second Coming

For people who love to travel, and people who love to read, it's always a great delight to encounter places in books that you know, even if only a little bit.

For several years, ever since Bob--my old boyfriend--introduced me to Southern Louisiana, that part of the world has been magical and mysterious for me.  In St. Francisville, I bought a book by the former Atlanta Journal Constitution journalist, Rheta Grimsley Johnson, and I'm now reading three by her, simultaneously, overlappingly:

Hank Hung the Moon

Poor Man's Provence

Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming.  

I love this writer!  She feels like someone I know personally. She's about my age, calls Georgia her home state, and she brilliantly describes the quirks of people and places.

Henderson, Louisiana, is the town in the Atchafalaya Swamp where she and her second husband Don bought a houseboat and called their playground and their "poor man's Provence."  They'd often traveled to France together and both loved the French-speaking Cajun Country of Southwest Louisiana.

Rheta, a lifelong Francophile, felt it was as close as she could get to returning to France.  Don loved it because it reminded him of his hometown, Moss Point, near Pascagoula.  It felt familiar to him--all the duck hunting and just hanging out with people who were never in a hurry.

"Get down," the Cajun folks call out if you drive up to their house.  It means "Get out of the car, come inside, sit for a spell. Don't be in such an all-fired hurry!"

Once Rheta gave her niece some advice that the niece thanked her for as "the best advice ever."

"Always have a trip planned.  You'll then have something to look forward to, a big crisp carrot to trot behind on drab or downright bad days, powerful incentive to finish any task at hand."

Rheta Johnson took the place of Lewis Grizzard (who died in the 90s) on the staff of the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  For seven years, she got hate mail because of her liberal politics.  But she stayed on, writing mostly personal interest stories and traveling around the South to snag them.

She was asked to take Celestine Sibley's place on the AJC staff when she died, but decided it was time to retire before attempting to replace another Georgia journalistic icon.