Jackson, Vicksburg and Clinton, MS: The McGreggors

"We were voted cutest couple," Janie pointed out, skimming her high school yearbook for the photo.
"Quite a few years ago," Gaylan said, adjusting his glasses to look.

They were cute alright, nothing changed in that regard.
Janie had a face of perpetual bliss. Her smile was full of stories and her fridge was full of souvenirs.
Gaylan had a voice like an old-time country singer. His conversations were sprinkled with endless trivia and fantastic dad-jokes.

54 years down the road, they still blushed about their first kiss.
They said it was on Reelfoot Lake pier. Janie found a snapshot of their more recent pier-smooch and showed me.
"We reenacted it."

The two of them were the parents of Matthew McGregor, a friend from college.

He gave me their number after noticing my stop landed 20 minutes from their home. It lined up flawlessly.  A day later, I parked behind their blue, flower-filled pickup in Clinton, Mississippi and gave Gaylan and Janie hello-hugs.

We were having fried catfish and greens for supper.
"You've got to have the real Mississippi experience," Gaylan said.

At Cock of the Walk Restaurant, Janie could hardly contain her excitement.
Out walked our waiter with a cast-iron skillet of cornbread and Janie told me to ready my camera.
They threw the cornbread two feet in the air, letting it spin twice before catching it face-up on the pan.
I was pretty impressed, admittedly.

The rest of our food arrived and one of their friends from church came around.
"You know the origination of hush puppies?" the gentleman asked.
"They started when a cook, back in the day, had cornbread to bake. A dog came in smelling the food and wouldn't quit barking, so the cook grabbed a ball of dough and fried it up fast, threw it at the dog and yelled 'hush, puppy!'" He smiled and awaited our reaction.

We replied with puns.
Their granddaughter Rae usually supplied the jokes, but Janie had a napkin with all her two-liners penciled down. I tried to ketchup and remember some, but I figured I'd leave the comedy to someone else.

Night one was sweet. 
I learned that the word ukulele means dancing fleas in Hawaiian native tongue.

I found out that Boniva, a town not so far away, was noted in the Ripley's Believe it or Not  for having a storm of frogs falling from the sky (due to a tornado that swept them up from a pond, but still)

and I grew familiar with the term "Nabs", short for Nabisco snacks, which essentially includes any cracker snack pack or munchie someone might want to go grab a Nab for.

The night ended after long conversations in the kitchen.

Gaylan and Janie felt nothing like strangers and I felt completely at home.
Their bed was comfy and it came with a quilt, hand-crocheted by Janie's mom.
Just like everything else in the house, the room was a mini museum, framed in old art projects and relics.
Sleep came easy, and in the morning, we were going to the Petrified Forest.

Day Two:

Kelsey Blue wanted to see the Petrified Forest pretty badly.
She liked fossils, crystals and stones. She enjoyed sifting for them in gem mines, picking them up in rivers and memorizing their meanings in shops. Once or twice, Blue gave me stones for protection.

She said she was scared I'd run into trouble. I ran into a lot of things, but I figured I was invincible enough. Blue gave me an agate key chain, "just in case," Kelsey would say.

Once, I was an idiot and ran around with my far-too-large Claddagh ring and it fell off somewhere. I wasn't invincible then.
I was sixteen and my parents had just given me the ring out of Irish tradition and I lost it within a week.
Blue was with me when I searched for it.
I told her its parts. It had a heart for love, a crown for loyalty and hands for friendship.

And it was nowhere.

Then Kelsey Blue, being the friend that she was, found my ring size and gifted me a new one.
This one had opal. She said it bore a 'loyal stone' which would make me look after it better.

I haven't been without it (aside from having to get it fixed) since.
It's on my right hand, always.

Blue studied that sort of thing, stones and fossils.

She wanted to see them in their natural state, part of earth before excavation. That's why the Petrified Forrest was on her list. So to the Petrified Forrest we went, right after passing the heart of not-so-bustling Flora, Mississippi.

On the park grounds, we walked past 38 million year old sequoias, firs, maples and spurge trees, once buried by silts of the Forest Hill. The trees' bark, filtered with minerals, eventually turned to stone and resurfaced. 

The petrified pieces were scattered, eroded, half-buried next to the living pines and ceder. We saw lichen slowly turning the rock into soil and stepped around the red sand walls from the Oligocene Epoch, wondering how the erosion kept the hills so tall.





































Loess silt eroded laterally, forming steep drop-offs and we crunched pine needles with every step, taking it in one petrified tree after another.

We walked the trail and thought about those who walked it before us.
When we were though, we decided to take a different kind of trek.
One through where the Confederates surrendered in 1863,

Vicksburg, Mississippi.

It was the town with the impenetrable natural fortress, Fort Hill, which stood watching over the Mississippi river.

There was no way down the Mississippi without passing by. Union troops back in the day couldn’t float supplies to the South without facing cannon fire. Someone had to gain control of Vicksburg in order to win the Civil War. 

According to the many pamphlets and videos, Union troops had quite a time trying to overtake the Vicksburg Confederates. The fort was stationed atop a high bluff, able to overlook a river bend slowing every ship that passed it. They had an easy target range.

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant went on surround the city from the south and east,  creating a siege on Confederate lines from both land and sea. 46 days later, after Vicksburg succumbed to desperate hunger after living off rats and occasional missing pets, Gen. John C. Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg on July 4th. The town hadn't fully embraced Independence Day since. 

"That's why Vicksburg never put on a firework show for the fourth of July," Gaylan said, regarding  the years they lived there, wondering why no gunpowder illuminated the sky.
"We had to wait for the casinos to come in and do it."

We stopped by the river thereafter to catch whatever glympses of overcast sunset remained by the bridge.

 The other side was Louisiana.
But we didn't have to be in Louisiana to have ourselves some serious creole crawfish.
We made our way to Froghead Grill and pounded through a basket of crawfish popcorn
(essentially breaded crawfish tails fried to crispy perfection) and made our way back home.

Janie and I turned through endless childhood albums of Matt
(which was hilarious, by the way)
and after enough mullet jokes surfaced, it was time for bed.
Tomorrow was going to be busy.

Day Three:

I found not just anyone can roam the wards of children's hospitals. Which makes sense.
With too few days to train and file background information, I had to give up my intended project and instead gift a few purses full of deodorant, toothbrush/paste, hair products and good intentions to the hands of some folks that could use them.

Hence, I walked around pot-hole filled Fondren, gave the purses away, then decided to dedicate some time to contacting volunteer places in Texas.

This trip through Mississippi was coming to a close,
and I spent a few hours at Cups Espresso Cafe getting to know what lied ahead.
I made some couchsurfing requests and planned to leave for Texas.

Instead, I found out Rae lived in Ruston, LA.
Hence, to Rae I went.