Life Goes On in the Cypress Swamp

 

Life Goes On in the Cypress Swamp

Friday, October 24, 2025

Good morning. This post is late. My day started well before the sun, but not with the quiet reflection I prefer. I’m up and moving, my hands deep in a bucket of soapy water, my mind cluttered with checklists. I’m cleaning cabins this morning, getting them ready for inspections. The work is physical, mundane, and absolutely necessary.

And in a strange way, I am grateful for it. Because if my hands weren't busy, I’m not sure what I’d do with my thoughts.

My mind, and my heart, are still trying to process the loss of my Uncle Jerry. It’s been less than a week, and the grief is still a raw, physical presence. It’s a blow to our family, but it’s more than that. It’s been a blow to our entire cabin community here in the Cypress Swamp. This small corner of Shreveport, this tight-knit world we’ve built, feels fundamentally altered. A part of its landscape is gone.

There is something profoundly surreal about scrubbing a countertop or dusting a window sill while your heart is breaking. The world demands order. The inspection sheet doesn't have a line item for "mourning." It just has a cold, impersonal list of tasks that must be completed. The floors must be swept. The linens must be fresh. The cabins must be clean, presentable, and ready, as if nothing has happened.

But everything has happened.

Life goes on, such as it is. That’s the hard, cold, and perhaps even merciful truth of it. The world does not pause for our grief. It keeps turning, and it keeps sending inspectors. And so, I clean. I scrub away the dirt and grime, and I try, for a few minutes at a time, to scrub my mind clean of the sadness. But it never lasts.

I’ll be sweeping the porch of a cabin and my eyes will instinctively drift to the empty spaces, the places he should be. I see the empty chair on my own porch from a distance. I see the spot by the water where he used to stand. This whole swamp is a map of his memory. Every cypress tree, every stretch of quiet water, every pathway between these cabins is a place where he told a story or shared a laugh. Our community didn't just lose a man; we lost our storyteller, our living history.

So today, I move through these empty rooms with the smell of bleach and pine cleaner in the air. I make the beds. I check the inventory. I do the work. Each completed task is a small, hollow victory against the chaos I feel inside. It is a way of imposing order on at least one small part of my world.

Life goes on. The cabins will be cleaned. The inspections will happen. And we, in this Cypress Swamp community, will continue. But we will be different. We will be quieter, carrying the weight of a missing story, a silent porch, and the profound, aching space where a bayou legend used to be.