Articles by Birney Imes
Partial to Home: Indian pink
Around this time a year ago, a friend and I were walking in a Noxubee County woods.
The leafy canopy above had turned the forest into an echo chamber for the trilling of birds. The dappled light it permitted played across what seemed infinite hues of green. Signs of spring were everywhere.
Partial to Home: Boy Cat, R.I.P.
About 15 years ago a stray cat gave birth to a litter of kittens in a wall of The Dispatch pressroom. Shortly thereafter she rendered them orphans when she tried to exit the building through a normally dormant exhaust fan.
Partial to Home: Of opossums and other critters we love
Near the end of the podcast, Gail from West Point called to tell about taking a can of potted meat re-labeled as opossum road kill with her to the Air Force Academy.
Partial to Home: Too close for comfort
The newest member of our household is under a self-quarantine. Eleven to 13 days. She just flew in and is not taking any chances.
Partial to Home: After a half century in the North, home
It was one of those glad-you-are-alive-and-out-in-the-world Saturday afternoons — sunny, bright, crisp and clear — and I was sitting in the three-sided shed that is the in-house dining facility of Brother’s Keeper Barbecue.
Partial to Home: Beauty and sadness as Louisiana dissolves into the sea
Ben Depp is a New Orleans-based freelance photographer with a fixation on Louisiana’s disappearing wetlands.
Partial to Home: Life lessons from Uncle Bunky
You put a message in a bottle and toss it out to sea hoping the right beachcomber happens by.
Partial to Home: A crazy animal for Paul Thorn
Chances are if you’ve paid any attention to the music scene in these parts, you know the name Paul Thorn.
Partial to Home: Tennessee Williams comes to visit
On the front page of the May 9, 1952, edition of this newspaper, a page that has stripped across the bottom: “Week’s best slogan: We’ll get more done if we work together,” is a story about Tennessee Williams’ visit to Columbus. This was the playwright’s first time back in his birthplace, according to the article, since he was 3 years old.
Birney Imes: Oak Slush Creek revisited
While battling a case of cabin fever on a cold, rainy afternoon the Sunday before Christmas, I sent Craig Hill a text asking if he wanted to go paddling. We’d had a lot of rain and the river was high.
Partial to Home: Mission Mississippi
It is not every day you drive down Seventh Avenue North in Columbus — a timeworn neighborhood made more so by a tornado 10 months ago — and see young Amish women in calico skirts toting power tools through red clay mud.
Partial to Home: Josh Frady: Restoring dreams
On a July day in 1966, MSU student and future Oktibbeha sheriff Dolph Bryan walked into the Starkville Ford dealership with the intention of buying a new car. As it happened, a salesman was sitting in the car Bryan would buy. He was reading a newspaper.
Partial to Home: A picnic of acorns and apples
Chances are if you ever took an art appreciation course you encountered Édouard Manet’s “Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe” (“The Luncheon on the Grass”). In this large canvas — now acknowledged as a masterpiece but considered scandalous at the time — the French Impressionist portrayed two men and two women picnicking in an idyllic wooded setting.
Partial to Home: Miracle in New Hope
Monday afternoon Bill Cole sat on a barstool in the empty bay of a metal building that houses Dixie Towing, the New Hope business he has owned and operated for 30 years and looked out across the road. Cole was wearing pressed jeans, cowboy boots and a black long-sleeved shirt. His swept-back white hair gives him the look of a country music star — think Charlie Rich.
Partial to Home: How Elvis bought Graceland
This past Sunday Ed Rice, Bobby Manning and I were headed north on Wolf Road when Bobby for no apparent reason launched into a narrative about his family history.
Partial to Home: Catfish ponds, cotton fields … and a coffee house?
Try to hold these two images in your mind. A young Mennonite man who spends workdays with his father, Michael, installing and adjusting control panels for aerators in catfish ponds in Noxubee County.
Partial to Home: Perfection as a business model
By the time he had worked five years in a local manufacturing plant Tony Parson knew he wanted out. But there was the usual ballast of house payments, health insurance, groceries, children, more insurance. He would endure the plant for 17 more years, until 2006.
Partial to Home: Squalid indifference
Back in the early spring, I sent Felder Rushing an email asking him to suggest plants that would work in the harsh environment of a
After weeks on the run, lawyer with Columbus ties arrested
July 14, 2025
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