I recently found an email I wrote to my southern friend Amy who wanted an outsiders' perspective on the South and its people. I responded with the sort of not-overly-groomed from the gut stream that follows ( Read more... )

Much like the storied and possibly-apocryphal hundred-words-for-snow of the Inuit peoples, the word 'summer,' when it stretches for a full six months, begins to lose all specificity of meaning on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. There are just so very many varieties of summer. For instance, there is the endless-70-and-sunny season of October, and its ( Read more... )

When I first got to Mississippi, nigh on a year-and-a-half ago (eesh), I gamely started tracking down recordings of delta blues, because, I figured in my Yankee logic, it's part of the culture down here, I should experience it. I confess to not fully understanding the music, though; I wasn't used to the low-fi recordings, the wailing lyrics with ( Read more... )

I made bread from scratch last night, just some yeast, flour, water, and two hands. I learned to make it the summer I lived in the Smokies, on a timber framing farm in the hills of North Carolina; the woman I worked for, an ex-architecture student from Manhattan now raising goats and selling frames, decided she needed to know how to make bread by ( Read more... )

St Rose de Lima, the Catholic church in Bay St. Louis, has a new priest. The old priest, Father Sebastian, had dark skin and a black beard, a lilting accent of Indian origin; his prayers of the people always ended on an upward note, a small musical "-ehm" finishing off his askance for mercy. He was surprisingly challenging in homily, and his ( Read more... )

[copied from my paper journal, dated July 3, 2007 ( Read more... )