FISHTRAP HOLLOW, Miss —
Norman Rockwell might have painted the scene, except it would have been too idyllic for him.
I have seen a bluer sky, but only on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. The sun warmed the earth to 70 degrees. Orange leaves held fast to the limbs of pear trees.
The oldest child visitor, 13, produced her copy of Southern Living and whipped up something called a Robert E. Lee pound cake on my old kitchen table. Mary Drue wore her stylish clothes beneath my pressman’s apron and looked like a million dollars. Hey, hey, Betty Crocker. This girl is a rocker....
The youngest child, Darcy, soon to be 11, ran relentlessly through drifts of fallen leaves with my dog Hank, acting the way children used to before they were tethered to television and computers. Long, shiny tresses were pulled back from her perfect face in an effortless coif.
Their mother read a book in a pool of sun on the porch. Their father hunted squirrels in the woods. Their grandfather, my husband, pushed a big turkey into a small oven.
If Thanksgivings were scripts, ours would have run on the Hallmark channel.
For 25 years, I’ve yearned for a weekend like the one we had. I knew this place had the potential. I just never could conjure up the family.
Except for a sisterly squabble over socks and one late-night, shrill political rant by me, the holiday went off without a hitch.
Writers always think a lot about “sense of place.” It is a phrase that crops up at conferences and in books that analyze famous literature. A “sense of place” is deemed important.
Before you can have a sense of one, you must have a place.
I knew I had found mine when first I saw this lonely hollow a quarter of a century ago. That’s not long in land-owning measure. My grandfather didn’t raise cotton in the field across the road. My mother didn’t rock me to sleep on the porch. I didn’t grow up seeing the sun set over the hay field.
But for a nomadic journalist like myself, 25 years is an eternity. This dollop of Mississippi hill country feels like an anchor at times, holding steady in stormy seas. And, yes, at times like a burdensome albatross.
I’ve lived places that were easier to love. Beautiful St. Simons Island, Ga., for instance. Nobody wonders how you end up there, if you do. They look around at the live oaks and fine beach houses and quaint seaside village and figure it out on their own.
This is different. It takes an imaginative gene and romantic heart to love this place passionately. The grounds aren’t groomed, and the old house is a time warp of good intentions and timber. I sit by the wood stove today to write these words because the window by my desk won’t close all the way.
Flaws can be beauty marks. Or they can be flaws, depending on your mood.
All I know for sure is this. On a November Thursday with a holiday name, ordinary things came together in an extraordinary way. Pine beetles and rotten floor joists and wavy Sheetrock and roadside ravines full of litter were forgotten, ignored.
Fishtrap Hollow was more silk purse than swine’s ear, and a few dear others shared the vision.
(To find out more about Rheta Grimsley Johnson and her books, visit www.rhetagrimsleyjohnsonbooks.com)
Opinion
The old hollow in holiday duds
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.” -
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. -
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered. -
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral. -
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.
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Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.
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Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley. - More Opinion Headlines
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