FanStory.com - Prologue: At Home in Mississippiby BethShelby

Everyone’s life starts somewhere, and no one gets to choose the place. Our parents make that decision, consciously or otherwise. It wasn’t a bad choice. For the first ten years of my life, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would choose to live anywhere else. Our first comfort zone is where we naturally crave to be.

This story is about my roots, my family and what it was like growing up and living in Mississippi for the first three decades of my life. Life happens and circumstances change, and although I have remained a Southerner, I might never have left the state if my husband’s job had not sent us elsewhere.

My mother and father and my in-laws were also rooted in the state, and for a long while, we claimed ownership to some reasonable size tracts of the Mississippi soil, so it was no wonder, we kept returning every chance available.

At the time of my birth, the world was still reeling from what was known as The Great Depression. I came into the world at home, arriving around midnight on a warm September night. The nurse and doctor assisting my mom helped me emerge into a room lit by oil lamps.

Our house, still unfinished, was only a mile out from the little town of Newton, but so far, the power company had not brought out the poles and wires necessary for electricity.
Water was brought in by the bucket from an outside well and heated in a kettle on an iron wood-burning stove. The toilet was an out-house, furnished with an outdated catalogue for the needed paper. The house was heated by a fireplace in one room.

This sounds like poverty, but it wasn’t. We were as well off as most of those around us. My father had a job in town and a car. We were landowners, totally debt free, and we never went hungry or wanted for basic necessities. There were those 'better off' financially, but as my mother often said, “You don’t miss what you’ve never known.” I was loved, and at that moment in my life, it was all that mattered. It never once occurred to me my family might be poor.

I am writing this story for my children and for anyone else who might be curious as to what life was like in the South starting over four-score years ago. I hope you enjoy my journey as I explore my limited world and seek to find out what this thing called life is all about.