On the morning of July Fourth the phone rang. It was Roger Larsen. He was riding around handing out tomatoes. In the background I could hear dogs barking and the voice of a child.
“Don’t pet the dogs,” Roger said to the child, before asking her mother if she would like some tomatoes.
“Sure, we’d love to have some,” I said after he finished that transaction.
Where else but Columbus, Mississippi, do you have a guy on the morning of Independence Day riding around in a pickup truck, a chorus of barking dogs in the back, handing out tomatoes?
Late that afternoon Laird Bagnall and I were paddling around the Island. As we glided under the old trestle, Laird asked if the rusting, graffiti-covered railroad bridge was still in use.
It is and I told him how, as kids, we used to walk it and sit on the center piling while a train passed.
The next evening out on a walk I stopped by Roger’s shop in the old Tag Plant building to thank him for the tomatoes.
We talked amid a swirl of chickens. One perched on Roger’s shoulder as he knelt.
After a time we walked back to his garden around which he’s built a fence to keep out deer and other would-be interlopers.
A passionflower vine, looking like the work of a floral designer, with its lovely, complex blooms, covered a section of the fence.
Roger went into the garden, dense with vegetation, picked two tomatoes and gave them to me.
The bad tomatoes go to the chickens, he said.
I continued down the railroad tracks, inextricably drawn by the pull of the old trestle.
The air was dense with humidity; the steady din of crickets and katydids animated the scene. This is Mississippi in summer.
The cross ties are close together so it’s no feat of daring to walk out on the old bridge over the river. You do want to be listening for a train whistle.
Some of the ties were covered with a sticky, shiny tar-like substance, a preservative that oozes out in the heat.
There was little of literary value, nothing worth repeating here, in the ever-changing graffiti on the bridge.
Downstream is the port with its clutter of barges; looking upstream, the view, with the exception of the water tower, is as it’s always been.
The mirror-like surface of the river reflected the puff of clouds glowing with light from the low sun.
Standing on a bridge that was part of your childhood landscape watching a day end. You realize the number sunsets such as this remaining in your account is finite.
At the Columbus end of the bridge on the north side of the railroad tracks someone has painted over a sign. On the left half of the sign is the word “No.” On the right “Yes.”
Lightning bugs flickered in the darkened foliage behind the sign.
Headed home, I stopped to admire Annis and Bill Cox’s guesthouse with its “What if …” mosaic walkway.
The house is painted the color of a July watermelon, which, as it happens, is the precise shade of red of the blooms on the large crepe myrtle immediately in front of it.
While there is great pleasure to be had walking the climate-controlled corridors of great museums with their revered paintings, this walk, on this sweaty summer night, too, had its share of visual and sensory delights, ephemeral though they may be.
Birney Imes ([email protected]) is the former publisher of The Dispatch.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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