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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
We made it through the heat wave! It was seeming iffy there for a while, though, as the air was feeling very melty like warm glue. By the fifth day in a row that the heat index was 106 it seemed the world was too hot to go swimming and I thanked the inventor of the air conditioner every afternoon.
Speaking of, I grew up spending summer vacations at a family friend’s historic home in Appalachicola, Florida and the house was famed for being the site of the very first air conditioner. It once acted as a Malaria and Yellow Fever sanitoirum back in the 1800s where a man named Dr. John Gorrie developed a cooling system for his patients. The early stages of the invention involved a system of air ducts in the walls outfitted with blocks of ice. This all eventually lead to him making ice and cool air by mechanical means in the modern process of sending gases through tubes.
That’s the full extent of my air conditioning knowledge so I’ll stop there but all this leads me to mention the beautiful new ice machine by Crawford Sports Complex! I happened to be walking by the day they were installing the machine and it made me feel cooler and more hydrated just to know it’s there. I’ve yet to get any ice and water from it ,but I’ve seen plenty of people – from fishermen to lake-trippers to work crews – filling up their coolers. I feel the ice machine is one small step closer to having a Splash Pad.
The installation of the ice machine also sparked the asphalting of the impromptu, muddy driveway at the entrance to our park. This was much needed and hopefully the landscaping efforts there can continue with plants, trees and a sidewalk! A few well-placed trees and a 75-foot sidewalk could really turn the entrance to our park and new ice machine around.
In other news you may have heard that Ole Miss won the College World Series! What a story! I kept waiting for us to do that Ole Miss thing we do where we blow it in the end but we never did. We had a few close calls, don’t get me wrong, but we prevailed! The team members themselves were a varied, interesting crew and it was fun to follow the series, picking favorite players. And, yes, State fans, it’s nice to have the trophy in Mississippi again thank you for pointing that out 400 thousand times.
Lastly, we all know Mississippi made the news and changed the country this week when the Dobb’s decision sparked the United States Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe versus Wade. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this in a weekly column devoted to living in Mississippi. All I care to say is that none of this surprised me.
The process leading up to this has been a slow-roll, building for years and years. There were plenty of chances along the way for the outside world to turn their attention toward us if they wanted to but they ignored us here, as usual.
It would do the country some good to pay attention to people different from themselves and adhere to the principle behind Faulkner’s line, ”To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”
