Summer 2016...
I had been back and forth to Columbus, Mississippi, in 2015 and 2016 and finally arrived in June 2016 as a new resident of the city. The first summer season here, I had left a drought back in Las Cruces, NM, and apparently had brought it with me, because that first summer season in Mississippi, people talked about an uncomfortable lack of rain. Pavement was cracking, normally lush grasses were burning up and the temperatures, along with what felt to me, the desert dweller, like high humidity made for scalding days when I first arrived, and I remember my first trip to Hattiesburg was in June or maybe early July, where I had been invited to read from my novels and chat with members of a newly formed writer's group and they had chosen my novels to read. So I was delighted to take that first longish road trip from Columbus to Hattiesburg.Boy was it hot, and dry. The strip shopping center somewhere on the outskirts of Hattiesburg where the group met was facing the wrong direction for the afternoon meeting and the hot southern sun beat into the south and west facing wall of windows in the room where the writer's group met. But I was thrilled to be able to travel south from Columbus and straight down to Meridian, MS, and then down to Hattiesburg.
I got a good look at downtown Meridian and downtown Hattiesburg before the meeting and had lunch in a very retro train station area cafe/coffee shop. Both of these cities were undergoing a kind of downtown renaissance when I arrived in 2016.
Weidmann's restaurant in Meridian was a real delight on such a hot summer day. In fact, the downtown was making improvements everywhere and it took a little maneuvering to find my way back out to the interstate to get back on the road to Hattiesburg.Columbus had one of the award winning downtowns in the South and had been designated a model downtown for several years. As in other places small towns and small cities had experiences big-box store growth on the outskirts of the towns and the downtowns had declined, some with boarded up buildings and urban decay, but not Columbus, which boasts the second largest number of historic buildings in the state, second only to Natchez, Mississippi on the banks of the Mississippi River. Columbus has the Tenn-Tom Waterway and Tom Bigbee river confluence, but also had a hilly part of town that made it picturesque and multifaceted.
Much of my first year or so in Mississippi was traveling from town to town, cafe to eatery to restaurant and hole in the wall, getting a feel for this lush, green state, and after that first drought like summer in Columbus, the other seven the summer seasons was more normal than that first year.
Market Street Festival in one of downtown Columbus' biggest events, and we are having the eighth on I've been to since I lived here. It is now almost summer of 2024, and right now in early May, just before my 76th birthday, I anticipate my ninth summer season here. The world has changed since I've lived here, the US has changed, but once again I think we're on the verge of winning against the powers of darkness that hung over our country from the first summer I arrived...no need to say more because this blog is not political but more human interest in the people where I now live.
