Jim Dees

COUNTRIBUTING EDITOR JIM DEES

is a writer and longtime host of Thacker Mountain Radio. He is the author of The Statue and the Fury - A Year of Art, Race, Music and Cocktails.

LOCAL COLOR

Imove my home office outside on these presummer days and find it refreshing except for the screaming grievances of the blue jays. What a brutish brood of bird they are! Loud, aggressive, stingy. Up to their beaks in vocal contempt, I sit below them, a target for more than their ire.

Hard to complain about spring but, if pressed, one would have to offer up blue jays as the rat in the punch bowl. I endure their swarming screech and stand my ground - well, patio – until they disperse.

For grievance-free tranquility, I drive out to the countryside and park my truck at the start of a winding country road for my daily two-mile constitutional. Actually, it’s not completely bird free. There are buzzards the size of jumbo jets and they sound like it when they take off.

On roadkill days these ominous big birds huddle in the trees like old humpback senators. They gather to hold vigil over even the tiniest sliver of carcass. I think of Faulkner’s quote: “… if I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.”

Indeed. Buzzards aren’t watching their carbs. They’ll happily polish off whatever a distracted SUV leaves behind, or they can settle in to make incredibly short work of a full-grown deer, leaving nary a hoof. Happy buzzards are a sure sign of spring.

Back in the 1990s when I lived in Taylor, MS, we knew it was spring when a yellow Volvo with Wisconsin plates arrived. It would be Greg Coniff, a fine arts photographer who would come to Mississippi, he said, because we had more variety of the color green that he had seen anywhere. He would stay several days in the spring and come back to take cotton photos in the fall.

As Oxonians know, artists come and go through this town constantly over the years. Many such visitors talk a good game but sometimes the results are thin.

After watching Greg go about his business, rising early, shooting all day, sticking to a schedule, we knew he was, as they say, legit. (He later had a show at Southside Gallery and his Lafayette and Yalobusha photos can be found online. He is now a major landscape photographer.)

Having an outsider show up and point out the beauty of your own backyard is always refreshing. Too often people take the wonders of their home for granted. I’ve lived here all my life and never really thought about our different varieties of green. It reminded me of the great Kentuckian, Robert Penn Warren’s remark that he wasn’t a Southerner until he moved to California.

Greg stayed with our friend, JR, during these visits and JR gave Greg a good dose of southern. One day, JR rounded up Greg, myself and the local shaman mechanic, Nicky, for a Friday ride to the beer store. Our vehicle was JR’s large, lumbering, land yacht, an Oldsmobile convertible. The joke was, the car seats six… for dinner.

It was a pretty spring day (much like today, as I sit outside, blessedly blue jay-free) and JR rolled the top down and put on Delbert McClinton. Rather than the highway, which could easily convey us to Panola County in minutes, JR took the back roads, pavement optional. The errand became an hourlong trip and Greg saw greens he could only dream of, and we did too.

I also remember the bemused look of cows as we floated by as if on a barge.

On the drive back, JR took the even longer way home and we approached a battered old bridge and abruptly stopped. The sign said, “Bridge unsafe. Use at own risk.”

Greg looked at us and we looked back at Greg. JR eased the land yacht onto the bridge and just as we hit the middle of the span, JR turned the engine off.

Greg never flinched but merely pulled out his camera and clicked a few shots off the Risky Bridge. JR cranked up the Delbert and we sat there and took it all in. Every shade of green imaginable, with white, orange, red, purple, pink, yellow and more, thrown in.

When we made the same trip the next week and stopped on the bridge, we were amazed how much greener and lusher the growth around the creek bed had become, almost a different place.

Greg grabbed his camera and focused and clicked. “This is why you guys live here,” he said.

Nicky nodded. “And the beer store too.”