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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
I’m writing this column at 8 a.m. on Monday morning from the warm and sunny front waiting room of Water Valley Dental’s Main Street office. Despite it being nice and toasty in here, it’s a mere 17 whole degrees outside. With temperatures that low, I guess anything is warm comparatively. It could be 40 degrees in this waiting room for all I know. It certainly feels like Jamaica in here and combined with the sounds of Chris Stapleton playing “Joy of My Life” softly over the office speakers, I don’t think I’ve ever been so relaxed.
Why do these low temperatures keep happening to us? What wrong turn did we all collectively take in our lives to deserve this? It doesn’t seem fair to either have to live in or be willing to live in Mississippi and then also have to deal with anything from one of the polar regions. But I guess the polar regions are currently melting due to Mississippi-style heat, so we can all begrudgingly call it even.
Speaking of Mississippi-style, I’ve recently joined the board of the Water Valley Main Street Association again. It’s been many years since I was on the Main Street Association board and a lot has changed! For one, we all communicate with each other via a work-group app! I honestly have no recollection of how the Main Street board communicated with each other my first go around. Email? Word of mouth? Telepathy? Carrier pigeon?
The Main Street Association has a lot more resources now and an enthusiastic group of local people with even more connections, know-how and resources. I remember years ago back when The Main Street Association did the “Movies on Main” series (some of y’all may remember that – we showed movies in the Main Street parks on Friday nights during the summertime.)
That whole deal started out with a couple of bedsheets sewn together, a popcorn machine borrowed from Renasant Bank, a pick-up truck to haul it all and a very small handful of people willing to get absolutely drenched in sweat setting the whole shebang up at 5 p.m. in the dead middle of July.
I imagine if we tried Movies on Main again, then the whole thing would be a lot more polished. Or maybe I’m just assuming so since I’m not a young person anymore and won’t designate myself a job that requires sweating.
There are several big events that The Main Street Association puts on throughout the year now — The New Year’s Crappie Drop, The Casey Jones Music Fest, The Wine Down, The Summer Sunset Series and The Art Crawl. None of it can happen without monetary membership and sponsorship support from all of us. If you enjoy any of these events — even if it’s just to tell someone not from around here that, yes, we have an event called a “Crappie Drop” — then stop what you’re doing right now, pull up a Google search, type in “Water Valley Main Street Association,” click the first link, scroll down to the “Partner With Us” tab and do the Lord’s work.
This way, when you’re dancing in the street at high noon while eating a funnel cake on Saturday March 22 during the Casey Jones Music Fest, you have yourself to thank!
