Yonder.ist has its origins in some of my earliest childhood memories. Growing up in the small town of Franklin, Louisiana, I spent a lot of time with my paternal grandparents, who lived out of town, on a road that followed a curve in the Bayou Teche known as “Irish Bend.” In the middle of the curve, and across the bayou, was the White Gold sugar mill, where both my grandparents worked. They lived in a six-room house that belonged to the company which was flanked by a horse field on one side and my grandfather’s garden on the other. Behind the house, behind the slowly collapsing chicken coop and horse shed, there was a sugar cane field that stretched all the way to the bayou.

Across the road there was a set of even larger fields, at the edge of which there was a band of trees that defined the horizon. When my grandfather told stories, he would often situate them “over yonder,” and when he said that he would wave his index finger in the direction of the tree line. As a child, I understood that yonder was a place just past that tree line. It may even have been called Yonder.

My grandfather had only a fifth-grade education, and he was by all accounts a difficult man. He was, when I knew him, already a bit bent by age. He and my grandmother fussed, as we like to say in Louisiana, at each other, but they also seemed to share an unexpected tenderness for each other. She always made him coffee the way he liked it every morning, and he always sat quietly while she watched her “stories” in the afternoon (aka television soap operas).

Both of them were patient with me, my grandmother teaching me checkers and pinochle (and letting me win more times than I can count even now, decades later), and my grandfather listening to the stories I told. They had a box of toys just for us grandkids out on the back porch, and there, after a Sunday lunch with the family drawn together for a few hours, my grandfather would follow the grandkids out onto the back porch, sit in a lawn chair, and listen to a series of stories as we lined up to tell him. How carefully he listened I do not know, but I know he stayed in that chair, nodded his head, and gave us the audience we wanted and, perhaps, needed.

Yonder.ist is my attempt to capture the fullness of that experience, to honor it, and to highlight just how important such moments are.