Everything I Need Is Here

A trip down memory lane reminds me that I'm not "staying put," I'm growing in place.

Last week, I attended a gathering of food system actors and activists—from farmers, to chefs, to non-profit leaders, and activists. I’m no longer an active part of that world, which is full of our state’s finest forward-thinkers and innovators, but I’m lucky to be friends with folks who are (hello, Liz Broussard and Noel Didla). The gathering was held in a building that once upon a time was a grocery store. When I first moved here, that building housed a non-profit that hosted community exercise classes and a farmers market, and whose general mission was to improve health outcomes for the surrounding community. It was also headquarters for the service organization that brought me to Mississippi.

Walking into that space felt like walking into the past, when Mississippi was new to me, when I was a starry-eyed volunteer whose mission was to teach kids about healthy foods. Everything around me then had seemed ripe for change, and I felt poised to be a change agent. I had no idea then that the biggest change would take place inside myself. Outside, the night air was cool, but I remembered the way the summer humidity felt on my skin in August 2013 when I arrived—sticky and inescapable, like the shock of my new reality.

Over the years I’ve wondered if staying put was a sign of personal failure. But the longer I’ve stayed, the harder it has been to imagine uprooting myself and my family, starting over in unfamiliar soil.

I thought back to my first house here, a rental in Fondren that I shared with two other volunteers who were also new to Jackson and the South. The rental was a real 1930s Sears house, the kind you used to be able to order from a kit and build yourself, which makes it sound more architecturally interesting than it really was. The house had peeling green paint and a giant magnolia out front with thick, low hanging branches that the neighborhood kids loved to climb. Inside, you had to walk through bedrooms to get to either of the two bathrooms, and there was a staircase in the back of the kitchen that went up to an unquestionably haunted attic.