By the time you read this, I’ll be back down by the bayou. There’s a pretty good chance I’ll be eating oysters harvested that morning, or shrimp and crabs from the Gulf of Mexico, only a few miles south. Then again I might be eating tangy gumbo z’herbes, made of greens and onions and thickened with potato and beans; it originated as a meatless soup served during Lent. Or I might be having something made with tasso (smoked and hot-spiced ham) or andouille (a garlicky spicy sausage not unlike a chunky Polish) or boudin (an uncured, unsmoked sausage containing rice and pork that’s eaten by squeezing the filling from the casing into your mouth). All three are time-honored products in Cajun butcher shops. Elsewhere in America, local butcher shops, especially ones that make their own sausages and cured meats, are increasingly rare. In southwestern Louisiana, almost every wide place in the road has a butcher shop with its own specialties.

If I’m not eating Cajun food – and sometimes even when I am – I’m probably listening to Cajun music, whether traditional or one of its offshoots such as Zydeco. In all its variations it is, as novelist Tami Hoag writes “Joyous and wild, a tangle of fiddle, guitar, and accordion; it invite[s] even the rhythmically challenged to move with the beat.”

It’s that food, that music, and the people who make them that keep drawing my husband, Peter, and me back to Acadiana. New Orleans is bright lights, glitter, and crowds of visitors – at least in the tourist areas back in business after Hurricane Katrina. There are upscale restaurants, jazz clubs and a host of often tawdry nightspots. It has its own unique appeal. But the heart and soul of Cajun culture is in southwestern Louisiana: Acadiana, also known as the French Triangle.

A bit of that Cajun culture recently moved up north along I-55, eventually transplanted itself in central Illinois, and took root in Middletown. I knew that Avery Soileau (pronounced Swah-low) was the real deal even before I met him. A handful of names predominate in Cajun country: names such as Thibodeaux (Tee-buh-do, Hebert (Abear)… and Soileau. But even if I hadn’t previously known his name, the instant I heard Soileau speak, I’d have known his origin. There’s no mistaking that musical Cajun patois. Approximately 60 percent of Cajun vocabulary is found in French dictionaries. The rest are words that necessarily evolved in a different environment and culture. It’s French with a southern drawl, complete with