Over the years, it’s a question that people who love the Neshoba County Fair get asked frequently: “What keeps you coming back?”
What, indeed?
Why do 10,000-plus people choose annually to return to live in rustic cabins and motor homes in close quarters in environs that are incredibly hot and dusty when it’s dry and knee-deep in red clay mud when it’s not?
Why choose to live for 10 days in a constant state of food preparation or cleanup, daily standing in line for showers while praying the hot water holds out - and expecting unexpected company from the time the fair opens until it closes?
It’s expensive. It’s a lot of work. It’s exhausting. Yet my life has always revolved around it. For Neshoba County Fair people, years are not really marked from New Year’s to New Year’s but from fair to fair.
In my mind and heart, summer ends and fall begins when the last dying embers of the Neshoba County Fair’s second Friday fireworks show are fluttering to the ground amid smoke and smells of cut grass, sawdust and meat smoking on a far-away fire.
After the better part of 50 years, I have come to realize that the Neshoba County Fair is different things to different people — and different things to the same people at different times in their lives. Like life, the fair evolves and changes yet at the core the constants remain.
For me, the fair is all that is left of “home” to me. My Salter grandparents’ old home place in the Arlington community of Neshoba County has long been sold to another family, as has the little house where I grew up in Philadelphia with my school teacher parents.
My grandparents and my parents and a beloved sister have died — as have most of my aunts and uncles. The cousins have scattered and are busy with their own lives, work, children and grandchildren, as I am.
Family gatherings — even with my surviving sister — are sporadic at best. As hard as it is for me to fathom, my wife and I now live in our family’s “home place” and the kids and grandkids make that home their destination.
But there are times that I just need to place my feet on Neshoba’s red clay.
I need to walk quietly in the Oak Grove Baptist Church cemetery at Arlington among my people and remember better days.
I need to buy some bacon and cheese and peppermint sticks at Williams Brothers store from Sid Williams — as my father bought those items from his father and my grandfather from his grandfather.
And more than anything, I need to take my place under the old oaks with friends and kin around the Founder’s Square Pavilion or the racetrack or on a cabin porch and share laughter and memories.
I need to awaken in a darkened, crowded cabin and see Kate sleeping — and remember all 22 summers we’ve shared at the fairgrounds and pray quietly for more.
For me — and I suspect for most of my 10,000-plus fairgrounds neighbors — politics and horse racing and carnival rides are merely the trappings of the Neshoba County Fair. The real fair is much more than those trappings.
The Neshoba County Fair is a magic city populated by the memories of children of all ages. Each summer, we return home to embrace the living, remember the dead and to bring the magic back to the city for another year.
