D’Lo
There's a place in Mississippi on Hwy 49, the precursor to I-55 that runs from the quiet brown waters of the Mississippi Sound through Hattiesburg, Jackson and to Yazoo City, where it splits into its western and eastern varieties, ending somewhere in the deltas and kudZu rich lands of northern Mississippi. The place is none of these mentioned, it's a but a blip, just north of Mendenhall. It' called D'Lo and I know nothing about it.
I know nothing about it, but I've thought about it twice over the last two weeks on unrelated occasions. Last week I went to Wikipedia to search for a list of all the towns of Mississippi, and then Louisiana. I was looking for something to inspire a band name and found nothing. While there I looked to see if D'Lo was still there. It was.
Today, while riding to Tuscaloosa, I looked out at the passing nondescript interstate that could be in anywhere southern USA, but which was near Laurel, MS and thought about my families discovery of of D'Lo in 1978. We, the traveling Fellowses of Michigan, heading south to our final Coastal destination, laughing about the name and wondering what was there and how it came to be.
A year later my mom and I passed it again on the way to Michigan for my grandfather's funeral. Three letters and an apostrophe. Not nearly as funny this time around.
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I reference pine trees a lot in these pages. But not the sexy kind, not the evergreen or the spruce. In the south there's the longleaf and it barely resembles the Douglas and Frazier fir. The longleaf, like the south, looks like it's southern. It looks not unlike a pervasive breed of southern redneck, wiry, skinny, close cropped hair, tatted up and ready to fight; anyone, regardless of a difference in stature, perceived or otherwise. On the coast someone called it a jack-pine and that's what I'll always call them. They're the ones you see in the interstate medians of Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, top heavy, yet defiant to the hurricanes that blow through every year. D'lo is littered with and built upon them. 492 strong, a sawmill town, it turns out.
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These are the pines of the small patch of woods at the end of my street growing up. Their pine needles making the ground soft and spongy as we explored. Their smell, I associate with my youth, with heat, with the south. We had a few of them in an empty lot next to our home and when I was the perfect climbing size, I climbed to the top of them, all 70 of my pounds making the top sway back and forth. I remember being proud of making it to the top, looking out south and seeing the beach beyond the woods. Alone in a quiet breeze.
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All of this is just an exercise though. A return. Hopefully a release. A test of memory or at the least an act of recollection. Of connecting the things I see passing down the interstate to other things and relating those things through words back to the world. Forcing a little to get things rolling. Stumble. Stop. Stutter. Start.
Some days things just flow and writing is as natural as breathing to me. But if I request of myself to write a song or perhaps a specific thought, most times I get nothing. At best I get something clumsy and as forced as you can imagine the results of making yourself write a song could be.
On days like these, I must grasp, and further, must try, lest the days turn to weeks, to months. There's twenty starts that the tasks of the day stole the momentum from and they remain sputtered and unfinished. There's some short blasts of anger that remain locked away, like the words in a kids shouting pillow, dampened and allowed to spread and dissipate, along with the anger they carry. Most days I think I want to write a book. Most days I don't even know where to start and the idea swirls with the rest of them in my head. Exciting, ominous, disjointed. Every one a possibility. Most days a possibility unfulfilled.
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Today though, there's D'Lo, memories of trips to Michigan in a Toyota station wagon. Of one occasion when KISS was playing at the Mississippi Gulf Coast Coliseum (A BEAVER PRODUCTION!) while we were going to be away, my mom promising we could go the next, flummoxed when KISS came back through on the tail end of the tour and she and my dad took their 8 year old and 3 friends.
There's jack-pines in the medians, swaying, weather defiant, bending but rarely breaking against the winds. Aromatic in the heat.
#hugsandhi5s
