I spent the weekend in Mississippi with my father and one of my brothers. We ate comfort food at “homey” restaurants and talked a lot about my mother, who just can’t seem to get her act together. We spoke about the farm and about our grandparents–my dad’s mother and father–whom we all miss. We told the same stories about relatives and cattle and farmhands that we’d told dozens of times before. We sat on the back porch and looked at the stars, which we could see because there aren’t enough streetlights in town to muck up the view of the night sky. I lamented the fact that I didn’t pay more attention to my grandmother when she pointed out the constellations to me as a kid–but not to the point of being maudlin.
As I was leaving, I drove around town a bit, over to the street where I grew up. I almost got lost trying to find it. I’d lived there ’till I was in 4th grade and returned to hang out with friends from the neighborhood well into high school, but now it looks as strange and foreign as St. Louis or Pittsburgh or Charleston.
I stopped by the cemetary to see my grandparents, too. I’m not really the sentimental type, but I like going to see them, especially when there’s no one else in the cemetary. They’re buried on the side of a lake, which is a good place to sit when the weather’s nice.
Mississippi’s landscape isn’t particularly pretty. In the winter, all you can see is the pine trees, gangly and tall, with stark, graceless branches. The land undulates a bit, but just enough to be called “hilly.” It’s lush, but it doesn’t have the character, the soupy, shadowy, big-leafed mystery that south Louisiana does, though they’re just a few miles apart. Mississippi is a plain, no-nonsense kind of pretty, like a well-formed Pentacostal girl on Sunday morning, or your memories of your mother after she’d been working in the garden: nice, but not necessarily something you’d want to grow old with.
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