Mississippi Revisited

This was originally posted in 2017.  I need to add an addendum here.  Look, I have been a blessed man.  I know that.  Today, I wish I could have been in Mississippi to say goodbye to my Aunt Authula Crout.  I’m not sad.  She was 95.  She lived a life most of us would dream of living.  Simple.  True.  Loving.  Tough.  Honest.  Classy.  Funny.  My Aunt Authula was all of those things and more than I will know.  Aunt Thula’s funeral was held today. I wish I could have been there to hug the necks of Janet, Boobi Sue, Joyce, and Doyle (Fred Biletnikoff)…an inside joke.  I love them all so.  I have been in Indiana my entire life.  My sojourns to Mississippi are too sweet to mention.

This was the last time I saw Aunt Thula in December of 2019.

From 2017…

A few days ago my dear wife, Carrie, my sister, Lynn, and my niece, Katie, visited family members in Mississippi. It was the first time we had been there since 2013 and that is shameful. As much running around as Carrie and I do, we need not wait four more years to get back. I say it again, it is shameful.

We had a great time. It was a wonderful visit. It always works out that way even when Carrie and I are walking at 8 in the morning to get a little exercise and the bright sun there is already strong enough to take the hide off of you. How do they practice football in this, I asked. I know…they are used to it. I am not. But that is not to say that I do not like it. The air there is much more kind to my pipes that the crud we are relagated to breathe in and out in Southern Indiana. Like the Berkshires, I’ll take the Mississippi air to take in and out any day, sun or no sun.

We saw Uncle Stanley and Aunt Reat. They are in a nursing home in Morton, Mississippi. Neither one of them can get around too well. Uncle Stanley can make out what you have to say to him if you can keep your voice long enough to do it. You have to speak up a great deal. Though he can’t hear and can’t see very well, he still has his wit about him. He was the only one on the visit to bring up the political spectrum in this country. Pleasantly, we agreed on the dim horizon from “left” to “right”.

Aunt Reat is an inspiration. She told us she never thought she would ever be in the spot she is in…in a nursing home. She was then quick to bring out the fact that many others there have it much worse than she does and that she is thankful and still has a great deal to live for. She is tough. It was hard to say goodbye to them. She’ll be 90 her next birthday.

We also had a visit with Aunt Barbara. This is another self-procliamed “tough old sister”. That is what she said in 1989 when it started to rain at an Ole Miss-Arkansas football game she and I were attending. I asked if she wanted to find cover. She set me straight.

Aunt Barbara’s husband, my Uncle Durwood Hines, was the first of the 17 brothers and sisters born to W.E. and Levi Jane Hines to leave us. He died of a brain tumor in April of 1988…April 18th to be exact. I know where I was when I got the call from my mother that day.
We still talk football, Aunt Barbara and I do. She still works fulltime. She will be 82 in less than a month. We also enjoy taking in a meal together. We ate catfish on Tuesday night at a place called The Cock of the Walk along the Ross Barnett Resevoir not far from Jackson. It was a feast. The best fresh water fish in the world.

Our last stop was at Uncle Carlton and Aunt Wanda’s house. Carlton Hines is the youngest of the 17 Hines children. He is 70 these days. He does not look it. I have all his white hair. He and I have a shared interest in music and football and we held forth on both subjects with earnest vigor sitting on his back deck while the ladies shared stories inside. It was an old-fashioned meeting of sorts. Carrie did come out to join us eventually. Our time there went by so quickly it is sad.

If there is one constant in geography and personage, it is a country road, maybe Old Hillsboro Rd, I really am not quite completely certain and I don’t have to be because I know the way. It is the same road that my parents drove on to the same house we visited in the 1970s,80s, 90s, 2000s, 10s. Five decades rolling up to the same house.

My Aunt Authula moved into this house in 1952. He her husband, Everett Crout, planted Sycamores in 1953. They are prominent on the property today along with an array of other tall and wide trees including Oak, Magnolia, Pine, and others I don’t know quite as well. My leaf collection was puny in the 9th grade Biology.

I do know I shot some ball on this hoop as a child.

Only in Mississippi could I get artsy with a basketball goal.

The back of the house.

Aunt Authula will be 91 this month. Like the house she still lives in, though Uncle Evertt passed many years ago, the place is still like it was in so many ways when I was young. There is a peaceful sensibility about the front porch where my Grandaddy Hines dipped snuff and took note of the weather. It is the Ryman Auditorium of front porches to me. I considered it a hallowed spot.

So does Carl. Carl, you are in the midst of greatness. I hope you appreciate it.
And so it goes. Mississippi is as sweet as ever. A much better place than given credit for or understood. But I suppose you have to know a thing or two to appreciate it, like anything else. Thank God I know what I know. Hope I can hang on to it, even if only in my mind.
Speaking the Mississippi rights…
Danny Johnson