I Leave Town And Water Valley Does Everything
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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
After a full week and a half of being out of town, I am finally back home and able to report from the front lines of Water Valley. I’d like to thank the Victorian era Wagner family for pulling the slack for me in terms of column content while I was gone.
These people had a lot of flaws, but providing written content against their will for a part-time history column was not one of them.
My current problem, though, is that I have only been back in Water Valley for less than 12 hours and now my weekly column deadline is already here. It’s hard to write 500 words about living in a place when you’ve only been back there long enough to blow leaves off the driveway and eat some enchiladas. So, after a quick scroll through the local social media headlines and community forums, I think I know what I missed. Against the usual stats, it was a lot!
As soon as I crossed the state line into Alabama a week and a half ago, Ole Miss stomped LSU into the turf at Vaught Hemingway. This alone was hard to miss. But on that same day, Water Valley hosted a brand-new Literary Festival and the annual “I’m So Water Valley” Festival.
Later that week was the annual Water Valley Art Crawl! Wow, okay. Thanks for waiting on me to leave to do literally everything. Where are all these events in the early-Februaries and mid-Julys when the grass isn’t even growing? We need to save something for the off-months.
The happening I missed that hurt the most, though, was when someone found a mysterious explosive device in a storage unit and hauled it to the Water Valley Police Department, which then had to evacuate not only themselves but a choir practice at the church across the street and call in the Tupelo bomb squad to deal with the situation.
Thankfully, no one was hurt. I think it’s important to keep up with your explosive devices, people. Don’t just leave them all willy-nilly in a 110-degree Mississippi storage unit sitting alongside Memaw’s glass-top coffee table, your high school Fugees CD and camping equipment from 2007. That’s not where you keep bombs. I won’t comment on the fact that the explosive device was removed from the storage unit and hauled up to the police station in the first place because not only were the intentions good in that action but because that honestly sounds like something I’d do if there were no one around to suggest otherwise.
I missed all of this local excitement because I spent a week at Emory Hospital in Atlanta to help my dad who had heart valve repair surgery. He did great and is back home on the mend! There was a chance that he might have had to have his entire valve replaced, in which case they would have used the valve from a pig heart. I was nervous how this would fair being that my dad loves barbecue sandwiches so much. Seems cannibalistic to have a pig heart and eat barbecue to extent that he does. But, fortunately, the surgeons only had to repair his current human heart which is a big heart full of love and fun! Heart stuff is no joke and I sympathize with all of you who have dealt with it in some form.
All this to say, it’s good to be back in Water Valley!
