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I grew up in a small town in the Mississippi Delta.  It seems odd to call it a small town, it was the biggest one around the area, we had to drive an hour or more to get to one bigger.  But it really was a small town, about 1/10 the size of the one my address is associated with now.  It is one that has been hit by hard times in recent history that has left the town even more depressed and smaller.  Many of those who grew up with me have left the area, some for bigger and better things, others left for school and either got jobs or got married and never came back, others had family members that left the area and have no one to go home to.

Me, it was never my plan to leave.  The Delta, the flat fields; cotton, rice, soybeans, wheat, Crowley's Ridge the peach orchards, all bits and pieces of my childhood that call to me, that are a part of me.   I wanted to come back after school and raise my family in the area I loved so much.  And for awhile it seemed that was exactly what was going to happen. However, that was not meant to be, early in my college career two events happened that caused a major rift in the connections I had to  my hometown.  In the following sixteen years, time passed, life moved on, but there was still a connection, one that silently drew me back home occasionally.  I could not define it, did not have a name for it other than home.

Through the intervening years, I learned more and more about myself.  I began to better understand what made me tick. I also began to reexamine those feelings and those ties and realize that some of what I thought was there was not really so.  Still, however, some connections remained.  some ties which I was not ready to break. Ties to which I held one end but wondered if the other end was still held.  Or was it dropped completely in the rifts that broke so many other ties.

In the past two years I have been given a gift.  A wonderful blessing that revealed that some of those ties were still held and held as tightly, though in a different way, as I held them.  This gift as also  made me realize that some of those other ties were not nearly as important as I once thought.   I want to make a trip back there one more time, hopefully more than that, see those lands, explore the old haunts, show my children where their mommy grew up, and hopefully introduce them some dear dear old friends.