The Nordic countries have their hygge, a cozy aesthetic embracing and romanticizing long and harsh winters. In the South, we have a summer season of delight. Not everyone would see it that way, to be sure. Many are the air-conditioning dwellers, vampirically white in mid-July, who refuse to leave their homes, cursing the heat and wishing they lived elsewhere.
There’s another way: embracing the searing heat, eating watermelons grown locally, fishing from the shade, hovering on the edges of cool rivers, and speaking poetically about an interesting way of life. A native son of the Lone Star State told me the bugs I was describing, known only by the itchy bites left behind, are “nociums,” a word I struggled to picture in my head, perhaps of some Latinate origin. But no, he meant they were “no-see-‘ems,” bugs that are very difficult to observe with the naked eye. Who can say the South doesn’t have poetry?
To that end, I have greatly enjoyed Tim Gautreaux’s collection of short stories, “Welding with Children.” First-off, the title is excellent. Second, the stories are steeped in a vanishing culture of the small-town, Southern Louisiana swampland that feels like perpetual summer. Gautreaux shuns the titles of Cajun or Southern writer. He, like many a good writer, emphasizes the importance of lived experience in forming the content of one’s stories. While he may not call himself a Southern writer, what he knows—and clearly, deeply loves—is the South.
In the prelude to this interview, I found the description of reviewer Alan Heathcock who wrote, “The stories are all about people who want to be good, who want to help others and end up helping themselves in the process. They are about redemption, with a tender sense of humor, as seen through the kind eyes of their author.”
Many writers do not have kind eyes for their characters. Their analysis is unnecessarily harsh when interpreting the thoughts and actions of the people they create. Gautreaux is different. He seems genuinely to enjoy the company of his characters. You can understand the frequent comparisons to Flannery O’Connor, though Gautreaux’s stories are very different from hers, because his characters are often societal outsiders, widows, orphans, old women, lonely children. The details are exquisite.
Take this passage from the humorous short story “Easy Pickings”:
“Mrs. Landreneaux was eighty-five years old and spoke Acadian French to her chickens because nearly everyone else who could speak it was dead.”
A good collection of heartfelt stories for the summer season.
