It’s Friday afternoon and I’m sitting on the front porch of an uninhabited trailer that until recently was the home of Homer Cantrell. Homer died on April 12 after a long illness. Longtime readers of this column may recognize the name. More than once I’ve waxed ecstatic here about Homer and his brothers’ exuberant Christmas display.
I’m sitting in a brown stuffed recliner so comfortable I’ve dozed off twice. Passing tractors chugging down McCullough Road, 40 feet away have brought me back to life. The recliner still has pinned to it a price tag marked “SOLD.”
Helen wakes me to say she’s going to the beauty parlor. She’s going dancing at the Junction tonight. “I’ll do more sitting than dancing,” she said.
There are four trailers here, Homer’s; the one his brother Lewis lived in; one behind Homer where his wife Lulu lived (they were separated, though not by much) and at the rear of the property, Zeke’s trailer. Zeke died in 2009; Lewis has moved to a house on Wolfe Road. Lulu has died, though not before moving back in with Homer.
Zeke was close to a savant when it came to fixing lawnmowers, I’ve been told. His yard was always full of them, even when he died. “That’s what we paid his funeral off with,” said Helen. Helen is Zeke’s widow; she still lives in the back trailer with her four dogs.
The four brothers and their wives for about 15 years — and that is only a rough guess — created a Christmas wonderland on a patch of land along this sparsely traveled stretch that connects Ridge and Wolfe roads. Somehow, the word got out. People came from everywhere. Helen remembers visitors from Pennsylvania.
Mary Betts Williams (she was Mary Betts then), told me about the Cantrells’ lights.
I became a devotee the first time I saw the place. Every inanimate object within sight was wrapped in lights: the fishing boat, well house, satellite dish, a beach umbrella atop a long pole, the surrounding mulberry trees, the mimosas. I was an unapologetic and unabashed fan. Some holiday seasons I’d come out here a dozen times.
The appeal was universal. A friend, who taught architecture at Mississippi State, came over with another faculty member, a composer who has since moved on to Stanford and has delivered a TED talk. Their initial reaction was speechless awe.
Without meaning to, the brothers Cantrell and their wives had made art. Art that was accessible, exciting and downright fun.
One year someone purchased a Christmas light tour at an Arts Council auction. Taylor Berry was our limo driver. It was the holiday season; naturally we went to the Cantrells. A Lowndes County version of a Broadway play.
The Cantrell lights was one of those many things about the South words won’t do justice. You just have to see it, experience it.
Beth just spent a couple days entertaining friends from the North. They picked blackberries in my brother Stephen’s garden; visited Tim Younger’s “goat house” in Steens; bought eggs from Scott Enlow at Black Creek Farm; visited with the Snows at Waverley; took some wooden cigar boxes to a dear friend, an artist who will make magic with them; visited Debbie Lawrence’s barn near Caledonia, a home for chickens, Sicilian donkeys, horses, dogs and cats; took Jimmy Graham a wall-mount jukebox for his “museum” that Joe Shelton gave us years ago after his father’s Ritz Cafe closed; paid respects to Miss Munro at Friendship Cemetery; perused K.K. Norris’ vintage clothing store; ate lunch at Helen’s Kitchen; bought boiled crawfish from Edward Kidd at Michael’s Bar & Grill in East Columbus and made an unsuccessful attempt to find a bottle of Mississippi-distilled Cathead Honeysuckle Vodka for a friend back home.
You could make this stuff up, but it would take imagination. A lot of it.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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