DeKALB - The Spring Hill Methodist Church and cemetery north of DeKalb on Mississippi 39 in north central Kemper County is a place that brings me back to childhood memories fleeting and precious to me now.
It's a tiny, white, one-room clapboard circuit church. As a child, I remember the church's old wood stove - later replaced by a butane heater - that had a flue through the roof.
My mother's father's people are buried here. My mother was born in the Bay Springs community in Kemper County in 1922 and some of her mother's people - the Cherrys - still live there.
The Spring Hill church might hold 75 people. The wood floor is clean and creaks a little, but the old church remains solid and well-kept.
When I was a boy, the "facilities" were outhouses. Now, there are modern "facilities" in a small outbuilding to the north of the church.
As my daughter and I stepped into the empty church late Sunday afternoon, the circuit church service programs for the day were on the brown pews - they had held their services that morning.
Other than the almost inaudible flights of a few busy dirt daubers, the church was as still and silent as, well, a church when Kate and I took a seat on the front pew.
No air was stirring, and the sun pouring through the two rear windows made the church warm, the kind of heat I can still close my eyes and remember on Mississippi spring days back when virtually no structures in Mississippi had air conditioning - particularly tiny rural churches.
We were on the way home from Macon where we had gone to church with my wife's family and then celebrated my mother-in-law's 83rd birthday. Kate had been to the Macon cemetery with her Uncle Gus and later with me visiting the graves of her kin there.
The trip to Macon had been planned. The side trip to DeKalb was a lark.
But after my daughter saw the graves of her great-great-great grandparents, great-great-grandparents and great-grandparents, we ventured into the old church.
There, memories of my childhood rolled back to me, memories of Sunday dinners on the ground, of family cemetery work days and of trips with my parents to tend the old Haskins graves.
I remembered attending church services at Spring Hill and funeral services for my kin folks. This little church is in the red clay hills of east central Mississippi, and the change in topography driving Mississippi 39 from Meridian north to DeKalb and beyond is startling in spots.
The church is near Sciples Mill, the old water mill that remains a small tourist attraction in that part of the state and on some days where fresh-ground corn meal is still for sale to those who want it.
My daughter listened to my rambling memories of the old church, of the lives of my people in Kemper County that I remember fondly from 40 years back and of who is buried in which grave, all with her characteristic good humor.
As I creep ever closer to the age of 50, these memories inexorably become more important to me, and I feel the need to share them with Kate so that she will not forget the Haskinses, the Cherrys, the Pooles, the Batemans and the rest of our Kemper County ancestors.
Aunt Pearl and Uncle Ernest Bateman had a lake and a camphouse just a few miles south of the church off Mississippi 39. The old camphouse extended out over the lake on stilts.
Aunt Pearl taught me and my sisters to fish for bream and white perch in that lake, and it was the site of our annual Haskins reunions.
Almost all the people I cared about who ventured to that lake for those gatherings are either old or dead. Only a few of my aunts, uncles and cousins remain to share those memories.
My late twin sister hooked me in the backside with a treble hook at that lake when I was about six. Daddy had to cut it with wire pliers.
Sitting on that old church pew, I thought of my sister and could still feel that fish hook just a little.
