This post was lost for a bit....but has found it's way back to the blog....



It snowed today in Mississippi, more on the coast than in Jackson. I saw my brother at lunch and he reminded me of a similar weather pattern that moved through south Mississippi in about 1954. We have a photo on the wall of Hal & Mal's of a snowman erected in our yard in Perkinston and all the melting, icy mess all around. Like today, it got cold and rainy, then sleet and alas, big fat snow flakes that stayed around just long enough to let school out and for us kids to quickly build a snowman and take a photo. My grandfather, M.R. Stewart took the shot, and I found the undeveloped film in this camera after his death. I developed the images myself in the darkroom at the old Journalism building at Ole Miss while I was taking a News Photography class in 1973. The film, and the snowman, had been in the camera all that time. Now we have this scratchy black and white image of my brother Hal, my first cousin Larry Allen Krohn and myself by the humble and crooked snowman taken on a day much like today. No doubt, within an hour or two after the shutter clicked, the snow had stopped and by nightfall, the temperature was hovering around 55 with a clear, colorful sunset in the west.
Today, as the melting snow and rain gather and run off to the storm drains and on to the Pearl
River and then, into the Gulf of Mexico, I reflect on that idyllic past, forever frozen now by the art of photography and the love of my patient and thoughtful grandfather.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.