Passing Through My Seventies

 I've lived in Mississippi now, for seven years...

Whoops...I just turned 75 this month (May 6) and realized that I'm passing through my entire seventies in Mississippi, in Columbus to be exact. I also realize that whatever I have said about the weather here, whatever the season, it can be said again year after year. 

And...Mississippi stays the same throughout the years, most beautiful, of course, in the middle of lush late spring and summer. Those are the best times for day trips and seeing picturesque places...

The image to the left is, of course, not a photograph but an ideal in some artist's mind, and yet like fiction speaks truth and inspiration more directly than a photo. It is the images I am getting in my mind's eye, now, from living here seven years and living out the entirety of my seventies. This is just one place I have never seen and yet I have seen a thousand such places, glimpsed from the driver's-side window, perhaps going past too fast to really see what I think I saw.

I've been a traveler by car all my life, from the time I got my drivers's license, or rode with my parents on family trips to visit relatives in Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico, to ranches and farms and winter RV parks.

I've seen bits and pieces of several states by car or bus, and it is always the backroad small towns and late night diners and early morning scenery that speaks to me. Mississippi has been ideal for all these activities, mostly during the day, sometimes at dusk, sometime on a foggy laden highway at dawn. 

In one of my posts in 2022, I introduced the upcoming anthology that my writer's group was working on, called Ferry Tales. It came to fruition and was published earlier this year (2023).  This has been in the works at least two years as members of the writer's guild worked on their own visions, mind's eye creations of tales of fiction, tales of eloquent truths; we based our initial stories on the idea of something like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but not quite, not really in the end. It was a good starting point. The book has sold out at least once at the Columbus Arts center where it is stocked. You can purchase the anthology from this vendor, as well. Expect the stories in this anthology to reflect two things, the individual writer's visions as well as each writer's stage as a writer. 

As it turns out, I infrequently post to this site, not for lack of enthusiasm or even ideas but because even in my seventies, I'm actively engaged in living here in Mississippi, spending time with friends, working as an editor and pursuing a new line of endeavor, being a colorist of black and white and grayscale art. I've also been working with old b/w photographs with some success. I initially turned to this kind of work from helping writers with their illustrations for their children's books, but I also took a turn at tweaking a local artist with her collection of her paintings. When we went through the hundred or so paintings for the book, she had me tweak the photographs, which involved the software I use—a superior alternative to Photoshop, a British version, as it were...

And this is where I will leave you, today...and return to my work.