School has been “in” for about a month in most Mississippi districts.
Except those doing year ‘round school — nine weeks in class and then two weeks out — all year long.
Growing up in the Delta, I associated the smell of cotton defoliant with the opening of school. In September, the Delta planters sprayed the leaves. The leaves then drop off, so the mechanical pickers could pick cleaner cotton and less trash.
In my 15th summer, I worked on my uncle’s dairy farm in Metcalfe, near Greenville. Riding to the hay field early morning in late summer, another uncle noticed the leafless cotton fields and marveled that it looked like a frosty October morning.
School started soon, and I was relieved to be in class from 8:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. and not on a tractor for 12 hours.
We were studying English literature that year and wadded through Samuel Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” All these years later about all I remember from it is the anguished mariner bemoaning that there was “Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.”
He considered the abundance of water around him a curse. And in his case, it was. But as I gazed out the classroom window (which I did too much back then), I recalled that we were about five miles from the Mississippi River, and maybe two or three miles from Lake Ferguson. Deer Creek was east of town about 10 miles. There were all sorts of borrow pits — we called them bar-pits — some people called them “blue holes” between the levee and the river where the dirt had been dug to build the levee. A few of them stayed flooded all the time. The rest of them some of the time. They made good fishing and swimming holes.
My point is this — we had and still have a great deal of water in Mississippi. And it is anything but a curse. I see a bunch of boats and water skiers on the Barnett Reservoir summer weekends and on the Fourth of July. I suppose people are trying to cool off. We did a live shot on the Rez for the “Daily Sip at 3:30” (WJTV, Jackson and WHLT, Hattiesburg) show on the 4th, and I thought I was gonna roast.
To me, the time of year we’re heading into now is more conducive for boat rides (or convertible tops down) than the 90-plus degree days of summer.
We have way more waterways than just the big lakes, too. I think I can still take you to a huge slab of petrified wood in the creek at the foot of the hill at grandmother’s house in Fulton. I’ve floated on Red Creek and Black Creek in south Mississippi. The Pascagoula is still untamed and explorable from the Chickasawhay or Leaf River. And a zillion more.
“Water, water everywhere” a curse? That poor mariner was just in the wrong place. He should ‘a been in Mississippi.
