Walt Disney said, “We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
One of my favorite ways to fill my time when I was a little boy was traveling down the hillside behind my childhood home, dodging the giant ant beds, mounds of uneven grass beneath every step, until I reached a familiar meadow of wildflowers. Seasons changed as did the branches of the pecan trees overhead, full of leaves, then empty, the only thing that stood between the clouds and me.
Mrs. Woodson, my fifth-grade teacher, told me repeatedly that I kept my head in the clouds and that my sins would find me out. I don’t know about the second part of that declaration, but I am still a restless dreamer. It seems I am always moving — moving around, moving forward, occasionally even backward — lighting here or there, much like a butterfly fluttering between country fence posts and towering Magnolias.
I can count nine houses that I have called home, some only for a season or two. Naturally, that little stone house where my mama rocked me to sleep and tolerated my Donny and Marie phase was my favorite port in a storm, the rock which was my home for 28 years. My mind wanders to the townhouse shared with my best friend Tracey for about a minute. We were so cool with a swimming pool, bean bags for furniture and wine coolers in the refrigerator.
The first home I had in Jackson was a cottage nestled quietly beneath the tall pine trees on Hillview Drive, and then I moved across town into a two-story Georgian style home with purple, red and turquoise walls. If those walls could talk, they would speak of the Halloween parties, Easter brunches, birthday cakes, holiday garlands and even a jazz trio which played there once or twice. Not long after that season, life and all its wondrous adventures carried me through an old Victorian bed and breakfast in Aberdeen, the storied Southside of Columbus, and back to the familiar neighborhoods of Jackson.
I have lived across the street from a Burger King, on a lake with two mated ducks that swam in the moonlight, and I very nearly moved my Christopher Radko snow globes and their ornate curio cabinet all the way to Alaska.
Now, I find myself staring up at the clouds again, giddy as I put out Mama’s wedding china in my newest home, an 1830s townhouse on the historic brick streets of Vicksburg, or as the locals say, “down by the rivah.”
I am a long way from that meadow of wildflowers where I started, but I am so excited about my new chapter. Perhaps Laura Ingalls Wilder put it best: “Home is the nicest word there is.”
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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