The concept of home is different for each of us and colored by our individual experiences. There’s our current home where we carry on the tasks of daily living, then there’s another place where our earliest memories and most vivid ones sometimes live, often far removed from the place we may now reside. 

If we are lucky, this is a place where our memories focus on the good times we shared with those we loved, while keeping the negative parts pushed back into that faded area of our minds that we like to avoid. This place, Flowers Landing, is where I was free to climb a tree or skin a knee. Where I could cry, hope, and dream. Where I felt safe to grow, and learn about the strengths and weaknesses of my family and my place, and figure out if I wanted to stay or go.

Tensas River
our former house now a hunting camp
Our camp at the landing
Flowers Landing Baptist Church

We all have this story living inside of us, the one about our family and home, and I would like to share mine with you. Perhaps you will find, as I do, a respect and admiration for those who coped with disasters, political issues, and struggles beyond their control, without many of the conveniences that we view as vital. Those who independently provided for their families, served their country and their community, and lived by faith. 

My family was much like the other local folks who lived in Northeast Louisiana at the time, enduring hardships and family conflict, while the world raged around them, but they were unique in their approach to the struggle. Their most remarkable successes and failures happened within the six decades between 1915 and 1975. This is their story that started in Union and Ouachita Parish and ended on Tensas River at Flowers Landing, near Newellton, Louisiana, the place that I call home.