Bonne Terre (Good Earth)

My husband is a landscape contractor and he recently changed the name of his business to 'Bonne Terre' Landscapes, his motto: "Planting Good Seed in Good Soil"... it is a biblical reference.  When you plant a seed, the soil that you plant that seed in is just as important as seed you plant.  If the seed is not planted in good soil, it will not produce good fruit; if the seed is not good, that bad seed will produce bad fruit.

My family and I are the seed and New Orleans is the soil.  What kind of fruit will we produce?  Are we good seed?  Is New Orleans good soil? By seeking God first, honoring our city and it's culture, raising our children to be respectable and respectful adults and doing something for our community, we are planting good seed. 

As Christians, we seek God first and pray for guidance in our decisions.  Moving back to New Orleans was a major decision for us.  It was my husband's idea initially and I know that he prayed about it and received the answer from God.  I'm not saying that I didn't pray about it, but I was much more skeptical about the move and I trust my husband and follow him as he follows God.  So although this journey has been a little rough at times, we know who orders our steps and that the seed of faith that we have planted will produce a great harvest.

One of the things that we love about New Orleans is the culture.  There is no other place like this. There is a rhythm and a language that is not heard or spoken anywhere else.  New Orleans architecture is second to none and we have the friendliest people in the world.  Now you might not get good customer service at the drive through, but something about the flavor of the people here, you don't really mind when they're rude to you.  Well, I do, but I don't want get cussed out, so I keep it movin'!

The next seed is a little more difficult: our children.  You can do all the right things, or truly believe that you're doing the right things, and your children still end up doing the wrong things.  It is usually not your fault, we all have choices and our children are individuals with free will and choices that they have to make for themselves.  But through faith and doing as the Bible says, "train them up in the way that they should go and when they are old they will not depart from it", although they may go astray, they always remember the lessons they learned as children.  It is an awesome responsibility, raising children, raising men.  We pray that the seeds of faith, hope, responsibility, integrity and respect for self and others will produce a mighty fruit.

We must also plant seeds in our community.  We live in a great city with great promise.  It is a part of our responsibility to make our community a nice place to live.  It can be as simple as keeping your lawn nice, not leaving trash outside your home, and so on.  We can also plant businesses in our community and support those businesses. As African Americans, I believe that we have a responsibility to support our own, not to the exclusion of others, however, how can we expect others to support our businesses when we don't support our own?  As planters of those businesses, we also have the charge of giving the best service and quality products.  We must go the extra mile and do what others in our chosen industry are not doing.  It can be something as simple as just sending Christmas, anniversary or birthday cards to  our clients.  A small gesture makes a big impact.  We can impact our community by providing quality services and products.

I am hopeful that my city will be a more beautiful flower on this earth; it is already growing nicely, let's plant good seeds so that the good fruit that we produce will be evident to all who see it.

Coming Home

"What do you think about moving back home?" Those words made my heart race, took my breath away. I wanted to cry. My husband was asking me if I wanted to move back to the city that another woman drove me out of; the city that failed to provide adequate education to my children; the city that in retrospect, I truly loved.

I didn't know how to respond, I was shocked, afraid, sick to my stomach. I lived in New Orleans most of my life, thirty-nine years at that point. Although we lived in Slidell, Louisiana when the storm hit, we still considered ouselves residents of New Orleans.

We evacuated early Sunday morning (like midnight, one a.m.), August 28, 2005, taking enough clothes for 3 days or so. We went home about two weeks later, though we weren't supposed to, to assess the damage to our home that we had only been living in for a year. At that point I knew that our lives would never be the same again. I knew that we would never live in New Orleans again.

I guess I was wrong. It has been five years since the devastation and to be honest, there is no place like home and no place like New Orleans. We lived in Dallas, Texas for a little over a year and Cypress, Texas for more than three years; we thought we were home... it was home, temporarily.

When I lived in New Orleans, I never thought about the great and unique things about the city. The architecture, the people, the food, the culture. Whenever I told someone that I was from New Orleans I felt a strange sense of pride, not really pride like you might think, but like I'm somehow different because I'm from there. We have a different thing going on here, we are just different. Sometimes it's good, sometimes not so good. When me and my husband say "only in New Orleans" it means something different everytime.

I'm gonna end this blog now, but I will be posting more in the future. All about my city....so you can love it too!

Check out my other blog at http://knowitall-donnaanne.blogspot.com/