Time Off

This weekend Brian and I took a little drive to Helena, Arkansas.  For those of you unacquainted with tiny river towns in the Natural State, it is about an hour south of Memphis right on the Mississippi River.  My mother's family comes from there. 

Each October about this time Helena is hostess to a world famous blues festival.  It's been called several things...most well known as the King Biscuit Blues Festival, and happily, hereafter to be known as such.  (It's a long story.  I'll tell you over a cocktail sometime.)

My Uncle Jim Howe and his family own the radio station, KFFA, that has the radio show which hosts the original King Biscuit Flour Hour.  They are entering their 70th year of broadcasting. 

I had only been to Helena once in my life and to the festival; I was 13.  So, I thought it was high time I got back there.  It was the 25th anniversary of the festival. 

Brian was feeling well enough and my Uncle O and Aunt Ruth had room at their house for us to stay. 

I've been missing my grandmother terribly since she passed away in May and these are her people; she is from Helena.  I suppose I felt I would be nearer to her somehow if I could spend the weekend with these distant cousins.  I knew it would make her very happy for us to go and learn more about from whence I came.

The festival was lots of fun; we helped sell King Biscuit tee shirts and bought some to bring back to everyone who couldn't make this trip.  I saw B.B. King play on Thursday night as I sat on the levee with the Mississippi River at my back.  Doesn't get more authentically Southern than that.  I had pulled pork sandwiches bar-b-qued in front of the liquor store next door to the place we were set up to sell tee shirts.  It was delicious. 

My Uncle O gave us the grand tour of Helena and the tiny "town" of Wabash that the family founded for the lumber company they started in the 1890s when they settled in Arkansas.  The family gradually moved from lumber to cotton.  The cotton fields are all still there as well as the tiny and the grand houses they built to live in. 

My uncles tell wonderful stories of my great-great grandmother Eva and my great grandmother Harriet.  Those were quite spirited women...and quite the sports fans.  I didn't know that could be inherited, but it would seem it is so.  The love of football and baseball is passed down in the genes.  Could be a recessive/dominant thing like any other genes though, I suppose if you are thinking to yourself right now--"Oh yeah? I'm not such a sports fan, missy."

We saw my Aunt Maud Cain...she's close to 100 years old and has the most genteel Southern accent and manners....you would think Melanie Wilkes was real and had somehow survived all these years. 

The Howes are firmly entrenched in Helena history.  The trip to the cemetery was very moving.  The cemetery is older than the Howes, however.  Confederate soldiers are buried there and their tombstones are at the top of the hill, guarding everyone still.  You can see the river from there. 

Brian and I both completely enjoyed this time away.  We usually only get to see these cousins when someone gets married or at the family reunions we have every two years.  And they usually come to us in Texas.  What a delicious treat it was to go to them and feel my grandmother around me again for just a little while.