Five months ago, I packed up my life in Pennsylvania and moved back to Mississippi.
It was not exactly a dramatic homecoming. I had returned many times over the years, visiting family, walking familiar streets, and maintaining a connection to the place I once called home. Yet moving back felt different. Visiting is one thing. Belonging again is another.
My connection to Oxford is older than my own memories. My father’s family has lived in Lafayette County since Reconstruction, and my grandmother spent more than twenty years working at the University of Mississippi. As a child, I would visit her in her office, not fully understanding that I was already being introduced to a place that had shaped generations of my family. Years later, I would return as a journalism student at Ole Miss, seeing the same campus through very different eyes.
Oxford has changed too. New businesses have appeared, old ones have disappeared, and even the University of Mississippi has transformed. I still have not stepped inside the new Student Union, a building redesigned during the years I was away. It is a strange feeling to return home and discover parts of your hometown that are new to you.
At thirty, I often feel both young and old here. Around college students, I am reminded that I belong to a different stage of life. Yet I also find myself surrounded by generations before me—my parents, my grandmother, and longtime residents whose memories stretch back decades.
Winter Storm Fern arrived during my first weekend back in Taylor.
After six years in Pennsylvania, I thought I understood winter. Mississippi quickly reminded me that familiarity and predictability are not the same thing.
The trees surrounding our house became encased in ice. Throughout the night, they cracked and popped like distant fireworks before crashing to the ground. My parents woke in the middle of the night to move the cars out of harm’s way. The power went out, and suddenly our routines narrowed to the basics: staying warm, finding food, and keeping our phones charged.
For two weeks, we cooked meals in the fireplace. I slept in my heaviest winter coat. We charged our phones in the car and stepped carefully across a yard transformed into what felt less like Mississippi and more like an ice-skating rink. At one point, I could see my breath inside the house.
It was not the homecoming I had imagined.
Yet there was something strangely fitting about it. Returning home is often portrayed as a comfortable return to the familiar. Instead, my first weekend back was a reminder that home can still surprise you. The Mississippi I returned to was not frozen in memory. It was a living place, capable of changing just as much as I had.
As temperatures rose and the ice melted, the cleanup began. Several damaged trees had to be removed for safety. We hired workers to drag branches to the roadside for county collection. Yet the more debris we cleared, the more visible another change became. Kudzu had steadily claimed what remained of the old family farm.
As we cleared the land, I found myself thinking not only about what had changed, but about what remained. I remembered the sheep we raised—the ones we cared for, loved, and eventually buried. My childhood pet sheep, Blackberry, is still buried on that farm. I recently learned that our donkey, whom I had rehomed a few years earlier, had also passed away.
The farm carries more than trees and soil. It carries memory. It holds the traces of animals we loved, the work of previous generations, and the stories that shaped our family long before I was born.
Now my family is making plans for what comes next. Once the kudzu is cleared, the possibilities are open. We are not yet sure what the land will become. A pasture, perhaps. A garden. Something entirely different.
That uncertainty feels fitting.
When I first moved back to Mississippi, I thought I was returning to a place I already knew. Instead, I found myself getting reacquainted with it. Some landmarks were gone. Others were new. Trees had fallen. Kudzu had spread. Even the university I once attended had changed.
Yet beneath those changes remained the threads that have always connected me to this place: family, memory, and community.
Perhaps that is the real gift of coming home. Not finding a place exactly as you left it, but discovering it again with new eyes.
Suad Patton Bey is a writer based in Taylor. A graduate of the University of Mississippi and Penn State University. Her interests include Southern history, culture, food, and exploring the connections between place, memory, and identity.
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