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Rocking Chair: A Generational Storyteller

KEDM Public Radio | By Kelby Ouchley

Published July 20, 2015 at 9:00 AM EDT

Not long ago a cousin passed along to me a chair that once belonged to my great-great-grandmother. She is said to have brought the chair with her when she came to Union Parish from the Atchafalaya Swamp or south Mississippi. No one is sure which. She died in 1925 at the age of 77. The chair is laden with hints and mysteries of lives past.

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Kelby Ouchley

Kelby was a biologist and manager of National Wildlife Refuges for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for more than 30 years. He has worked with alligators in gulf coast marshes and Canada geese on Hudson Bay tundra. His most recent project was working with his brother Keith of the Louisiana Nature Conservancy on the largest floodplain restoration project in the Mississippi River Basin at the Mollicy Unit of the Upper Ouachita National Wildlife Refuge, reconnecting twenty-five square miles of former floodplain forest back to the Ouachita River.

See stories by Kelby Ouchley