Delta Dawning

Linda Burton posting from Jackson, Mississippi – I’m in Jackson now. Praise be, I got the show on the road without too much fanfare this morning; no cats hid under the bed and commute traffic had thinned by the time I started driving. It’s 265 miles or so from Little Rock to Jackson, depending on where you cross the river, so I knew I’d get to my next new home well before dark. Freeways don’t make a direct connection; state roads lead from one chunk of interstate to another, though not in a straight line. Some of the highways were two-lane but I didn’t mind; the slower pace gave me more time to enjoy the countryside, never far from the Mississippi River, or pieces of it now landlocked in oxbow lakes. Every inch of the rich dark bottomland was either growing something new or just finishing a crop; bright green fields lay beside freshly-plowed brown; dust from tractor tires drifted and mixed with smoke from recently cleared brush; white cotton fluff  lay disappointed beside scraggly dead mother plants. Silos edged these fertile fields; filled with grain? I don’t know which grain grows here, when I think of the Mississippi Delta I think of cotton. And Delta Blues, of course.

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