Once a year, usually at the height of summer, my sister and I were loaded up into our ’72 Olds Vista Cruiser and spirited off to spend a long week with my grandmother in Mississippi. The nearest town of any size, Belzoni, was a good 15 miles away from the little cotton farm down in the Delta where my grandmother lived most of her life. The Sunflower River was about two miles to the west – and it usually flooded once a year. So the house was surrounded by levees that could quickly seal off the flood waters once they started to rise.
There wasn’t a lot to do on the farm. There were three TV stations – four if the PBS channel from Greenwood was coming in. But unless you were a Porter Wagner fan or liked soap operas, there wasn’t much point in turning the TV on anyway. Once, my cousin Paul and I found a six-pack of Miller Lite under the bathroom sink – which seemed like an odd place to store beer. But Mamaw was a tee-toataler. So which just figured someone who did drink had hidden it there. We spirited our prize out to the deep freeze in the pump house, got it a little cold and split it. We got busted right away: Turns out Mamaw washed her hair with beer. Who knew?
Another time we went swimming in the catfish ponds across the road from the house. Momma, Mamaw and the assorted aunts at the house weren’t too happy about that, either.
Like I said, there wasn’t much to do there.
I killed most of those long Mississippi afternoons off sitting on the levee with an old Marlin .22 bolt action rifle, killing anything that stuck it’s head up out of the murky swamp water. I killed 13 water moccasins one afternoon – my personal record. Then I completely cleaned out the bullfrog population around the house. And I got in trouble for that, too. My Uncle Earl, who was off on the riverboats, liked to gig them and fry their legs up for dinner and he had to drive all the way over to Gooden Lake to find any frogs when he got home because I’ll killed all the ones around the hosue.
The woods behind the farm had always been off-limits to all us grandkids. They were full of snakes, we were warned. But one day, bored with the lack of action on the levee, I took the rifle and wandered off into tree line behind the barn to see what was there.
Sure enough, I killed a timber rattler right off the bat. But other than that the woods were empty. The ground was cracked open from the drought, and the air smelled like a mix of wild dill and sage. I pushed through some brittle old palmetto bushes still clinging to life and wandered through the forest looking for anything of interest.
