Partial to Home: A son returns to his musical roots
It was too much to get into a single photograph, the scene in front of us.
Partial to Home: A turtle swimming across the river
Turtle has just one plan at a time, and every cell buys into it.
— Ted Kooser, poet
It’s not often you see a box turtle swimming across a river. At first glance, it appeared to be a snake engorged with prey it had just swallowed. When I pulled close and realized what it was, I turned the boat to watch.
Partial to Home: A country funeral
We are standing in the graveyard of a country church talking in hushed voices, about 60 of us. Hollywood could not have come up with a more beautiful setting for a funeral.
Partial to Home: Growing Aunt Zada’s white eggplant
In a world trending toward one-click-and-it’s-on-the-way commerce, it’s reaffirming to run up on someone who grows and sells watermelon plants from seeds found in a deceased uncle’s freezer 20 years ago. Or white eggplant from seeds stashed in a baby food jar in the house of a grandmother named Zada.
Partial to Home: Revisiting Highway 61
I’d seen lots of country churches, though none with such lovely proportions or so beautifully sited. So it was on a clear spring day in 1986 I happened to be standing on the banks of Deer Creek, my head under a dark cloth, scrutinizing on the ground glass of my 4×5 view camera a reversed image of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, Estill, Mississippi.
Partial to Home: A morning in Steens
Ross, a kayaking buddy, likes to take a garbage bag on our river outings so we can police the take-out area after we’ve finished paddling.
Partial to Home: Celebrating the obscure
On a recent, brilliantly cold morning while navigating a kayak down the Buttahatchee somewhere between Lawrence Bridge Road near Caledonia and Highway 45, I thought about the late Robert McG. Thomas Jr., the celebrated writer of obituaries for the New York Times.
Partial to Home: ‘James and me and the River’
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been walking the trestle. By that I mean walking out on the old railroad bridge over the old channel of the river near the south end of First Street near Carrier Lodge. My children have “walked the trestle,” so have the grandchildren.
Partial to Home: The pull of the river
“The Lower Mississippi River is suffering from gross misunderstanding & neglect. Most people think of it as either a drainage ditch or a super-highway for tugboat commerce. Its neither. It’s a wilderness in the heart of the South.”
John Ruskey
Partial to Home: River cats
Early Sunday afternoon, on the day Mississippi observed its 200th birthday, Larry Priest and James “H.D.” Taylor unloaded two fishing kayaks from the back of a battered GMC pickup and dragged them to the river’s edge.
Partial to Home: Home on the range
Margie Hall is talking about the Ranch House, the restaurant that has been part of her life since she moved to Columbus from Gordo in the early 50s to carhop for her brother, Bill Hall, who owned the place.
Partial to Home: Keep them doggies rollin’ …
Earlier this year Doug Wheeler, 76, broke his ankle while water skiing. During his seven-week convalescence, his wife, Pat, chauffeured him on his daily rounds.
Partial to Home: Jim Lavender’s circus dreams
All his life, even before he was stapling posters on telephone poles advertising upcoming Ringling Brothers shows and B.B. King concerts for his Uncle Dave, Jim Lavender wanted to be in the circus.
Partial to Home: Difficult conversations
In the city of Berlin south of the Brandenburg Gate and several blocks west of Checkpoint Charlie, there is a museum called “Topography of Terror.”
Partial to Home: Dangerous words
In May 2014, James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, visited Columbus. Fallows and his wife, Deborah, also a correspondent for The Atlantic, were touring the country in their single-engine airplane.
Partial to Home: Marion Fairchild’s wonderful (racing) life
Late Tuesday afternoon five people are sitting in the living room of the small brick house Marion Fairchild shares with Joyce, his wife of 50-plus years.
Partial to Home: Rafting down the Tombigbee
About a year ago, four Mennonite boys from Georgia came up with the idea to build a houseboat and motor down the Mississippi.
Partial to Home: Fredrick Jackson steps up
We had been talking about his growing up in Columbus and where he went to school, when I asked Fredrick Jackson what got him into politics. He held up his hand.
“First, let’s talk about my wife,” he said.
Partial to Home: ‘Weird’ pieces of pork
Facing a day of rain, I went to Starbucks Sunday, a week ago, and bought a New York Times. Regardless your politics, the Sunday Times can be a cornucopia of delights and — assuming you have two hours or so to devote to it — the best argument I can think of for hold-in-your-hands newspaper reading.
Partial to Home: Mrs. Sparrow’s birdhouses
About 20 years ago, when the Internet was in its infancy in these parts, Betty Armstreet Sparrow joined a Yahoo on-line craft club and met a woman in Hannibal, Missouri, named Jackie. The two became best friends.