Living in a Tornado Alley

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Living in a tornado alley is an experience not for the faint of heart. Every week during hurricane/tornado season, which was pretty much nine months out of the year, the sirens went off weekly. The best thing the small southern town did was to invest in loud enough sirens so that nobody would be caught unaware of impending potential disaster and were able to hide in a safe place like a shelter or a bathtub.

Trailers were shaken and rattled from their tied foundations like cheap carnival rides that needed urgent repairs. Some became easily airborne before they were smashed into smithereens.

At first, we automatically hid inside the tornado shelter in the garage which, in retrospect, was not such a good idea. It had thick walls that would withstand a lot of wind power but there was a water heater in the dark, dank room with not much fresh air coming from the garage through the slats of the very thick and heavy wood door. It gave us a false sense of protection, I suppose, since we could easily be subjected to scalding water if the house would be damaged.

So, we started “hiding” into the basement where at least we had a couch to sit down on and bookshelves with magazines and my collection of books. But it was dark, and electricity was always the first thing to go. I never bought a generator; it was something we could not afford to have - too expensive for the budget of a single parent and teacher.

The power would go out on a dime and we suffered various levels of misery – extreme heat or extreme cold, depending how hot or how cold was outside. The temperatures inside would reach unbearable levels in August and terrible wet and icy levels in early spring or late fall.

We started out with 16 majestic tall pines that the previous owner and builder had planted in the 1950s and, in the span of fifteen years we had lost all but one to various hurricanes, tornadoes, and straight line winds.  These fallen sixty-foot trees blocked the entire cul-de-sac, our and neighbors’ yards and required serious clearing intervention.

During Katrina, the entire street was blocked by significant debris and cranes had to extricate a passage for people to be able to get out. The roots stood high in the air and left huge craters behind after being completely pulled up like weeds by the unimaginable force of the wind.

We were grateful to out of state cleaning crews, food and water trucks from local churches and neighboring Mennonites, who would show up with axes and chainsaws and start clearing and cleaning, cutting lumber, piling it up out of the way, and bringing a hot meal and bottled water long before the first FEMA trucks pulled in.

We could only imagine the additional devastation in flood areas like Louisiana where the water surge would inundate homes up to the ceiling and having to deal with the destruction of everything they ever owned being covered and destroyed by mud and mold.

And the people who survived by some miracle the devastating winds were shocked to discover that their homes disappeared completely from the face of the earth and they found themselves only in possession of the clothes on their backs. Digging through the muck sometimes brought out a serendipitous family photograph that somehow was spared and was left behind. The concrete foundations of their former homes were the only physical evidence that the homes had ever existed in the first place.

After days of not being able to shower, going to the temporarily opened gyms for a shower became a blessed luxury. Finding a room in a local hotel that finally had power and being able to sleep in comfort again made us appreciate that much more what we had before the power went out for days and weeks at a time.

The harder to fill huge craters in the yard and the feeling of desolation made life that much more depressing. It took its toll on our next-door neighbor who, after two weeks of darkness, no heat, and living in his house like a mole, took his own life in his bedroom.

It was so sad that none of us knew what he was going through, he did not choose to share his misery and despair with the rest of us, perhaps we might have been able to save his precious life. We were all trying to survive within the confines of our limitations. People seldom realize how quickly everything crumbles like a house of cards without power, heat, A/C, water, and food.

We lost count how many times the entire content of our freezers and refrigerators spoiled after days without power, how many shorted television sets, microwaves, and other electronic devices we had to replace, items struck by lightning or burned out by power surges. We replaced three air conditioning units crushed by fallen debris and large trees and four roofs in an eighteen-year period.

Once we were shopping at the tiny local mall, three miles from our house, when all the windows blew out by straight line winds. Another time I was driving on the highway and was blown over on the other side of the road like a tiny toy. Luckily, there were no other cars in sight to cause a crash.

If a tornado hit or skimmed our town while it was cold outside, the house would become freezing cold fast. No number of blankets or clothes would keep us warm. We even tried to foolishly warm up with the outdoor grill which we brought inside. With no fireplace, the fumes were too much to bear, and we gave up, opening doors to air the house which made it that much colder.

The campus where I worked was hit twice quite hard. Several buildings were damaged, and a couple had to be demolished. With each tornado, more magnificent magnolia trees were uprooted, trees that had been there for generations. A dormitory was hit while students were huddling in their bunks and were missed by dangerous and lethal flying debris like pieces of lamp posts, impaling their beds or living quarters by mere inches from their bodies.

During sudden freezes, following a heavy rain, power lines would snap like bread sticks, and, aside from the treacherous and slippery roads, we had to contend with live wires on the ground, and miserable cold temperatures inside. God’s saving grace was that we still had our lives and the homes were still standing.

The ominous dark clouds, high winds, and driving rain or hail were always replaced by beautiful blue skies and sometimes rainbows, shining light over swaths of devastation that had obliterated people’s lives and sometimes their very existence.  And the memory and psychological desolation of those devastating times is still painful to this day.

Twenty More Years of Socialism and No Good-Byes

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015 ASTRA

When I left Romania after twenty years of frugal subsistence and tyranny under Ceausescu’s communist regime, I thought the nightmare was over, I was moving to America, the land of freedom and opportunity, and everything would be all right. All I had to do is study and educate myself as fast as I could.

There were so many opportunities to succeed! I worked very hard and I eventually transformed these opportunities into success. Nothing was given to me on a silver platter and I certainly did not have white privilege, on the contrary, I was told time and time again when I looked for a job that I was not a protected minority. I watched classmates with lower grades and ability, who learned to milk the rigged system, get jobs they did not deserve simply because they had a different skin color.

Something did not feel quite right in the academic environment I chose. I felt that I had escaped one nightmare 7,000 miles away, leaving behind forever my beloved family, and jumped into another bad dream, one run by American academics and administrators.

If I were to survive, I had to learn new skills to cope in the more covert communistic environment rigged in favor of tenured liberals who protected, rewarded, promoted, and tenured nobody else but more liberals.

I am not sure I could endure it today, considering the appalling communism in the American academia, on every American campus, where free thought and divergent opinions are not allowed; the faculty and administrators are no longer hiding their communist agenda. Campuses have become breeding grounds for future anarchists of America who are carefully shaped and selected for their robotic ignorance of anything of value and vitriolic aggression.

I had spent my last contract weeks in 2008 in the vaunted hallways of academia shredding every Economics lesson I had ever taught to my college students and to my gifted 11^th and 12^th graders in a southern school, in preparation for my retirement.

By shredding all my papers and lesson plans, I somehow wanted to erase the twenty years of frustration and pain I had experienced with some of my socialist colleagues and one administrator after another who were eager to serve the collectivist cause of social justice rather than merit, uniqueness, and excellence. In retrospect I wish today that I had kept the lessons. I also left behind all the foreign language dictionaries and many lesson plans I had developed. I am sure they were thrown out as soon as I had vacated my office and turned in the key.

I was not surprised that none of my colleagues moved a finger to celebrate my retirement. But an active parent, who appreciated my teaching, organized a collective celebration for me, two other retiring colleagues, and an administrator.

At the time, I was the longest serving teacher since the founding of the school. I walked out the door, without fanfare, a thank you for my service, good-byes, appreciation, or even an “I love myself” certificate or plaques that were so generously given to my colleagues over the years. In the grand scheme of things it does not matter anyway.

I did not realize how bad it was until the liberal newspaper whose owners also controlled the mass-media in the small town, refused to run a paid ad about my retirement. It is impossible not to know in a small town who all the prominent teachers are, especially someone like me who did not promote their societally-regressive agenda which they euphemistically named progressivism. At the same time, they ran free one-page news stories on the retirement of the administrator after four years of “service” and of my two colleagues. I was persona-non-grata no matter how I sliced reality.

The sad reality was that a few highly progressive families in town owned pretty much anything of value, including the minds of current and future Americans.

Most of my former students, with few notable exceptions, became devoted liberals, lawyers, feminists, doctors, advocates for social justice, heavily involved in global citizenship efforts, international non-profits, and teachers who proudly impart Common Core “values” to their students, the new generations of “progressives.”

I was one of the best paid teachers in the state at the time, not because I was the darling of the socialists surrounding me, but because I deserved it and few if any could replace me. I could teach four entirely different subjects with ease and knowledge, Economics and three foreign languages. Nobody else could match that skill or take it away from me.

I walked out the door with a sense of personal accomplishment in the face of so much adversity but also of regret for my twenty years of service that I wasted on progressive ingrates. By the time they reached my classroom, most of the students had already been thoroughly indoctrinated into socialism/communism as a perfect societal ideology.

The moment I walked out the door, a sense of freedom overwhelmed me - I had successfully survived the second communist phase of my life. The first one was escaping from communist Romania in 1978.

The small southern town was a safe place at the time to raise a family even for a single parent like me. Colleagues had asked me repeatedly how I could be anything else but a Democrat, when I was a teacher, a woman, a single mom, and a foreigner.

We were not legal immigrants in the late seventies; we were foreigners/aliens with a green card. I did not mind the term “alien” as long as I was not going back to the communist Iron Curtain and the oppressing life. I still don’t find the term offensive today. We were alien to these lands and to its customs.

It was not an auspicious time to be a foreigner/alien then. Nobody fawned over us, we had to have legal papers to be in the country, and we had to be healthy. In other words, we were properly vetted because legal immigration was strictly enforced and was not meant to benefit the immigrants but the American people.

There were not exactly many Romanians in the south, we were pretty much oddities coming from a faraway country that nobody had any idea where it was geographically located, nor did they care. That feeling extended to my American children who eventually felt frustrated and perhaps understood the feeling of isolation, of being different.

When they were smaller, they would beg my mom and me not to speak Romanian in public because people stared at us. My children were quite embarrassed to speak a foreign language fluently but they appreciated that skill as adults. Many families would not allow their children to play with mine and we were followed in stores as if we were going to rob it at gunpoint.

They did not know how many times, while I was pushing a stroller with mom, we were asked to leave mom and pop stores as our business was not welcome there. I swallowed my pride and went about my business. Mom, even though she did not speak English, intuitively understood the insults. But we did not allow that offensive and ignorant behavior to define who we were. These people were not xenophobic; they were ignorant and fearful.

But one store welcomed our business with open arms, and the owner’s son became our friend to this day. Of Jewish faith, perhaps he understood more than he let on the difficulty of being different in a small southern town.

Times have changed and now illegal immigrants and economic refugees from non-Christian lands rule the country; southerners and Americans in general bend over backwards to please them, rolling the red carpet and spreading their hard-earned wealth to economic refugees through generous welfare programs. I wished they had extended just a smidgen of kindness to us; we would have felt so much better.

I was lucky to find Lois and Harold, with their two lovely daughters. Through a twist of fate, they became our adopted family. We had spent many holidays with them and visited them through the years. I am not sure I could have adjusted so well to southern life without their help and advice.

There were other legal immigrants like us and they were treated the same. We formed our own club and helped each other the best we could with advice, food, clothes, rental money for expensive apartments in a college town, adjustment to a foreign life, and translation services for citizenship papers.

We cooked ethnic foods and had monthly pot luck suppers in the homes of those who were lucky enough to have afforded to purchase a home. Most of us were poor students hailing from communist and other totalitarian regimes, often struggling to raise and feed a family in a small apartment or a tiny rented house.

To my knowledge, those friends I made became contributing members to our society and, I am almost certain, they never promoted utopian communism.

Mississippians Are Resilient People

My azaleas in Mississippi
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2004

As a resident of Mississippi for thirty years, I learned that living in the tornado alley close to Tupelo meant that downpours, high winds, and spun-seemingly-out-of-nowhere tornadoes were a weekly occurrence during hurricane season.

The first tornado I experienced took down part of the only mall in Tupelo and caused severe damage in its vicinity. The hit sometimes looked like a surgical strike and other times it downed an entire patch of forest on Natchez Trace, skipping and jumping to other locations for miles. We had straight line winds that often caused more damage than some tornadoes did.

During my tenure at the local university, most of the old trees, including a beautiful and venerable magnolia were uprooted. Several buildings, including dorms, were so severely damaged that they had to be torn down and rebuilt. Students were missed in their beds by mere inches by flying lamp poles or huge tree branches, and cars were smashed by falling trees.

I will never forget looking out of the window at the menacing clouds in the distance, watching my neighbors’ son get out of his car and, before he entered his parents’ house, one of the very old trees lining the street fell with a loud grown on top of his car, flattening it into a pancake.

Spotted tornado alarms would go off every week and people had to seek shelter in the bathtub or, as in our case, in the tornado shelter built inside the garage. The former owner, a doctor, thought that it was a good idea to place the water heater in it as well. I know he planned it because I found the architect’s drawings in the hall closet.

Living in the country for a while, I witnessed tornadoes do a lot of damage to trees and at times unlucky cows were struck by lightning or picked up by the wind cone – sometimes they were dropped nearby, sometimes we never knew where they went until other neighbors would find them dead or alive.

Living in trailers in the south was an entirely novel experience for a European like me – I’ve never seen one before.  During high winds and tornadoes, the tin can on wheels, although anchored well, rattled and lifted up as if trying to fly like Dorothy’s house in the Wizard of Oz. During sun-shiny weather bees, mice, and other critters found their buzzing and stomping grounds inside the thin metal shell and thin insulation.

We survived Katrina simply because we lived on higher ground and many hours inland but the wind damage was tremendous. Our sturdy house was built in 1960 when construction was a serious business, and homes were not built of spit and toothpicks.

We lived for three weeks without electricity and covered in 60-year old pine trees that fell around our home and into the street. The loneliness and despair stemming from the devastation around us was overpowering.

An entire town in the southern part of Mississippi was razed from the face of the earth as if it had never existed. Only concrete slab foundations and pipes jutting out of the ground remained. The media did not cover that disaster much because the attention was entirely focused on New Orleans and the people self-trapped in the stadium.

Mississippians, churches around the state, and the Salvation Army, sprang into action and started sheltering people, feeding them, providing water, cleaning up the incredible mess, and rebuilding quietly and efficiently in the same manner they’ve been fighting the force of nature for ages.

My next door neighbor shot himself in his bedroom. He had mental issues and the damage from the storm and the loneliness was too much to bear. Someone bought his house for pennies on the dollar because nobody wanted to live in a house where such tragedy occurred.

Mother Nature with its spun tornadoes did not care that it was a really hot or a really cold season, it left us without water and electricity for days and weeks. We stayed in hotels, showered at the gym, and helped other people do the same.

We lost refrigerators and freezers full of food many times over. I can’t remember how many times I’ve owned microwaves and TVs struck by intense lightning; one microwave I was attempting to buy from Sears cost me one penny – they could not find the price, it had been written off the inventory for disposal, so they sold it to me for a penny.  I’ve replaced HVAC systems flattened by fallen old pines twice and the roof three times in the twenty years I’ve owned the house. Yet my fig tree survived. To this day it gives an abundant crop of figs to the family who bought our home.

When the street was impassable due to fallen trees, our Mennonite neighbors from Brooksville showed up with chain saws and cleared it in less than a day and hauled off the timber. They dragged the roots to the dump and filled the huge holes left behind with fresh soil. Other flying debris which landed in the yard was also carefully cleared.

One of the pleasures of living in Virginia, aside from its natural and unmatched beauty, is that I do not have to hear the tornado sirens every week, telling us to seek shelter. We’ve had high winds that have caused some tree damage and a few tiles stripped off the roof, but nothing compared to the Mississippi tornado alley we had to live through almost every week when torrential rains came out of nowhere.

We’ve had highly powerful and intense hurricanes and tornadoes in the last two centuries but the population density was much lower and the infrastructure less developed. Billions of dollars fly out the window with the fury of wind and water, depending on the value of the homes and businesses in its wrathful path.

In the South Mother Nature unleashes its fury periodically and people learn to cope with such intensity because they are resilient and selflessly helpful to each other in the face of disaster.

 

The Greatest Generation of the South

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Ina Faye’s mother was a “pack-rat” who lived through the Great Depression. A child of seven brothers and sisters, they lived in dignified poverty, glad and thankful for hand-me-downs, clothes, apples, peas, okra, and whatever their neighbors could share in those difficult years. It was a hard-scrabble life but nobody complained much.

Ina Faye’s dad came from a well-off family. Even though he could give her mom whatever she wanted, mom still tended to hoard things. Dad was a farmer who owned a dairy, a milking machine, and even ran Charlet (Charolais) cows bred for beef.

Recycling grease in containers for later use, she would cleanse the grease with potatoes to prevent cross contamination of frying smells. Having brought her frugal ways into the marriage, she saved all the time and cut corners.

When she passed away, Ina Faye found yards and yards of string, old twine, boxes of saved aluminum foil, washed, dried, and neatly stored for future use, jars of buttons, tubs and tubs of Crisco shortening, used tin foil plates scrubbed clean, and batches of home-made lye soap for her husband to use after fertilizing the fields and working on farm equipment.

Ina Faye’s mom always stocked up on sale items and, since Southern ladies fried most of the things they cooked, Crisco shortening was a must pantry item to store in excess.

Old dresses and ragged shirts would be cut into strips and made into lovely quilts which Ina Faye still proudly displays in her Mississippi home. As it was the case then, mom always made clothes for her girls until high school. A terrific seamstress, she made dresses and aprons for herself and other females in the family, a must in the wardrobe of any Southern country woman at that time.

Hancock Fabrics made a good business selling sewing implements, from Singer sewing machines, to buttons, to thread, fabrics, yard sticks, and McCall’s dress patterns made of thin onion-skin beige paper.

Ina Faye found an entire cedar chest filled with fabrics her mom had purchased to make dresses for Cox’s army. The fragrant scent of cedar brought back instant memories when she opened the lid.

In the late 70s and early 80s, the tide started to turn and southern moms started shopping more and more for ready-made clothes in department stores and the fabric shops started to disappear. There are few left around the country, such a novelty that the younger generations do not understand.

An occasional downtown fabric shop in a small town always makes me stop to peruse the racks of fabrics. The smell of cotton dye, the wooden shelves, and polished floors bring back memories long forgotten. I too had sewn my own clothes and my babies’ little dresses in the late seventies and early eighties. Sewing was terrific therapy for the soul and it saved us so much money.

The Greatest Generation learned to scrimp and save, using everything up until it could no longer be fixed and it had to be recycled. An appliance, a tractor, a vehicle, a stove, or anything with a motor, was fixed and reused until it fell apart. And even then, it was recycled or scavenged for parts. Nobody liked to buy on credit; they saved until they had enough money to buy what they needed.

And then, there were Green Stamps given at the grocery store each time a purchase was made. Women filled books of them and bought kitchen items and small appliances. It was so exciting to fill a new book, that much closer to a can opener, an electric frying pan, or a set of dinner plates.

Amway and Tupperware became popular among country folk. Families would have parties, selling vitamins, soap, farm surfactant, and plastic storage containers from Tupperware. There were few families in the South who did not have a Tupperware party and kept their rice, flour, tea, sugar, and other ingredients in classic orange Tupperware containers. My girls played with a Tupperware red and blue puzzle ball with different geometrical yellow shapes that had to be fitted through proper slots.

Everything people ate was produced on the farm. On a special day, dad would take the children to town for a cold cola in a glass bottle, taken out of the grocery store cooler or on a trip to the downtown Rexall Drugs counter where they served cola floats from a real fountain. When the children finished their drinks, dad would return the empty glass bottles to the store owner for a 5 cents refund per drink.

Ina Faye’s parents never bought them candy because mom would parch peanuts grown on the farm and would make chocolate fudge with the peanuts; on weekends, while they played games with friends, they had delicious treats. Her cakes and fried chicken from scratch were “second to none.”

It was a simpler life, close to home and to the country that revolved around church, a life that the children of today will never get to experience. It was much safer, closer to church on Sunday morning, evening, and on Wednesdays. Few girls were sexually active, it was something people did not do, it was immoral and dishonorable, and guys did not expect girls to “put out.” There was intense shame attached to such loose morals, and children were taught right from wrong. Most kids did not get into drugs, there was no Hollywood telling them that anything goes.

Ina Faye’s dad was highly respected in the community and knew most people in the area. He was the Justice of Peace for many years and a good friend of the Sheriff who lived up the road from his home. Her dad would sometimes hold court in their living room and a few couples were married on their front porch.

It was a life from another century when family, church, citizenship, hard work, and morals mattered. It was the 20^th century generation of Americans that had made America great.

 

 

Flying South for Spring

From the moment I left the house, I did not know what I was going to find on my journey. This time I left at 3 a.m. and I discovered that, even at such an early hour on Easter Sunday, the roads were not exactly clear in the suburbs of Virginia, the capital of congestion and perennially clogged highways and interstates.

On my way south, my airline ticket offered a convoluted route via the windy city. Once aboard the plane, having escaped the unnecessary frisking of the TSA, I started perusing the in-flight magazine – they’ve never disappointed me, bursting with colorful ads, magnificent stories of faraway romantic places that look so much more fascinating in glossy photographs than in reality, and the usual environmental propaganda. This time it was all about “green” coffee, sustainability, community gardens, and U.S. Airways’ one world alliance (part of the merger with American Airlines) that is supposed to compete with Delta Sky Team’s. The name “one world alliance,” meant to help “international travelers better connect with their world locations,“ gave me shivers.

An elderly gentleman seated next to me, a physician, was bemoaning the state of medicine today and how it was Mitt Romney’s fault (he said it at least three times during our incipient conversation) and how people in Chuck Grassley’s office wrote the Affordable Care Act. Not one time did he call the bill Obamacare or blamed those who passed it in the middle of the night. I was irritated and ready to do verbal battle. I don’t know how, but I am always finding myself seated on airplanes next to liberals. I can tell by the way they dress, they behave, the way they hog the arm rest, and how they invade the floor space with their bulky carry-ons and computers. Normally there is no conversation with such people but he started it.

He confirmed my suspicion that he was a Democrat. He told me that he had to stop accepting diabetic patients with Medicare because the reimbursement was under $9,000 per year and he felt like a criminal having to justify to Medicare every penny spent on diabetic supplies. As much as he wanted to help patients, he was fed up with Medicare. And of course, it was Mitt Romney’s fault.

I explained to his seemingly deaf ears that Medicare was stripped of $619 billion over a ten year period precisely to fund Obamacare. He was appalled that insurance plans were so expensive now, could not understand why, but thank God for subsidies, and was hoping that we will soon have a one payer system just like in the UK because it works so well there. He had no problem with the rest of the working country subsidizing insurance for those on welfare, illegal aliens, and Muslims or other religious groups that find insurance abhorrent but demand free healthcare.

I was listening perplexed - I did not want to insult this person I just met. I chose my words carefully, I had to bite my tongue several times, and it was very hard to listen to his outrageously ignorant claims. He became increasingly uncomfortable and, had the plane not been full, he would have changed seats gladly to get away from my logical descriptions and explanations of the disastrous Affordable Care Act that is going to destroy our stellar healthcare. We parted ways hurriedly, and I barely had enough time to hop on the next flight, the last leg of my journey.

After bumping my head because I am taller than the overhead bins on a Canada jet, I happily deplaned on the tarmac of my beloved South, crossing my fingers that my luggage had made it as well. It was a gorgeous morning, cool and not humid, early enough to have breakfast and grits.

I accepted the strange car that the rental agency had reserved for me and whispered under my breath that I hoped it won’t fall apart at the seams. Our secretary had bought a Kia years ago and it had been a lemon from day one. This one was a stylish silver grey and had Soul written all over the black interior. Peripheral visibility was poor and it had lots of blind spots. I clutched my cross and said a silent prayer before I drove off. The roads were not crowded at all, nothing like the congested roads in Virginia with the motto – Welcome to northern Virginia, there will be delays. At times, the highways were almost empty for miles. My eyes were filled with the lush green vegetation, the colorful symphony of wild spring flowers, the hilly landscape, and flocks of animals grazing peacefully in fenced pastures.

The sky was liquid sunshine blue, crisscrossed by what appeared to be airplane vapor trails that did not dissipate for hours. It was so strange, I took a few pictures. I would not have noticed them except the small airplanes making these trails were quite noisy overhead. I don’t understand why some trails dissipate immediately and others take hours.

I stopped in my former hometown to visit the house I owned for 24 years. The street was lush with blooming fuchsia and white azaleas, bathed in sunshine and happy bees. The back of my former home looked like a solid green jungle with vines completely covering the brick steps and strangling the remaining trees. Renters never take good care of someone else’s property. I could no longer see Tiger’s grave; it looked entombed in tons of overgrown weeds, unpruned bushes, and kudzu. The azaleas and rose bushes, narcissus bulbs, tulips, and daffodils had long been obstructed and covered by a green mass.

A weak meow brought a furry surprise from a bush, the black and white kitty I had rescued years  ago and named Princess. She followed me down the driveway, into the street, trying to hop inside my car as I was getting ready to leave.  My neighbor promised to take care of her six years ago when we moved, and he had kept his promise. She remembered me and allowed me to pick her up and shower her with hugs.

The old high school building was empty and up for sale. The local furniture store that has been in business for 50 years was closing its doors. The street I took to work every day for 20 years was the same. It took me five minutes to get to the university. The expertly-manicured lawns were green already and the old trees bursting with flowers. The giant magnolia remained untouched by violent storms. Everything was deserted, save for the gate guard. Even the cafeteria was closed. I was disappointed that I would not get to see Mama Dee, every student’s cafeteria confidant and advisor. She greeted them for breakfast and lunch every day with the same words, “How you doing boo?.” Chef Fidel’s miniature garden had been replaced by bushes and flowers.

The Tombigbee waters seemed placid. I wondered if the resident gators were still hiding in the fishing holes along the banks.

Driving to Tupelo, Elvis’ birthplace, was like putting my mind on cruise control – I knew every road, pasture, home, farm, and gas station along the way. Nothing seemed changed, time stood still. Towns lost mom and pop businesses, national chains moved in, some homes were abandoned and shuttered, but churches were full on this glorious Easter Sunday. I was back in God’s country - everything was closed except for the chain bookstore. Liberals need their place to drink coffee and read free magazines.

Okolona seemed deserted. A few cars drove by slowly. Life seemed so calm and gentle, a welcome simplicity punctuated by the buzzing of bees. I almost expected to see the roads rolled up for the day.

The Turners welcomed me into their home with open arms and hugs – I had not seen them in a year. Lois had prepared her wonderful Easter meal. Life has not slowed her down much. She is just as lively as I remember her the first day we met in 1978. Harold, our WWII hero and veteran of the Battle of the Bulge is 92 years young. He stands tall, moves with purpose and energy, and still drives his truck to the store. He helps with occasional repairs at the flower shop, getting down on his knees better than most young people.

Harold delighted us with one of his war stories. His troops were returning exhausted from overseas and stopped for the night in the Civil War Cemetery in Fredericksburg where they rolled mats and slept on the ground between graves. As a treat for dinner, Harold had prepared them five sweet potato pies with potatoes he had bought from a local farmer. Some of the soldiers were not familiar with the tasty southern dessert but enjoyed it nevertheless. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to drive to Fredericksburg without thinking of Harold’s soldiers bunking for the night in the cemetery.

Time flew by and I had to say good-bye once more. I don’t see my adopted family often anymore but they are always in my heart and prayers. Without their advice, guidance, and loving acceptance, I would have never been able to adapt to this country when I first arrived. With their loving encouragement, I became a proud American by choice.

I stopped in Tupelo for a fill-up at the same gas station on top of the hill, not far from Baskin Robbins. A young man with a toothless grin said, “You ain’t from around here.” Yes and no but I miss it dearly. It is the free and patriotic America I discovered and loved when I first arrived. It has not changed that much in this charming southern town. I did not want to tell this smiling and welcoming man that I live in a place where America has changed irreversibly - nobody speaks English that much among the tower of Babel of unassimilated immigrants. People speak a language that admires primitive third world cultures and promote Spanish and global citizenship in schools. Children learn at an early age to hate themselves for being Americans. This man would not understand why progressive Americans speak the language of socialism and communism. This world I see every day is so far removed from the South, it is an alien and anti-American world ruled by crony capitalists and progressives.

The sun was setting behind me in glorious pink, purple, and orange hues. As I drove east, I took in the landscape with the eyes of a child who discovers something cherished and I breathed the fresh air of temporary freedom before returning to the stifling and suffocating alien world of the northeast that crushes the American spirit for financial gain, power, and glory.