Each tree tells a different story. They are individual and yet unified at the same time. Some stand a little taller, some slump a little more, a few are slender, a few more are thicker, many are a little crooked, many more grow straight and tall. There are different colors of bark, different patterns of moss, different slopes of branches, but they're all still trees and they all stand quietly by watching the world turn.

There are old trees and young trees, and then there are the ancient trees that might have watched my great-grandfather go off to fight in the Civil War. There are tall, straight trees growing in rows, just anxious to become a part of someone's house someday. Then there are the craggily oak trees, waiting for someone to come lay up in their branches and dream.

When I was little, my sister and I used to think the woods were a magical place. We pretended fairies and wood sprites helped us explore, and that nymphs and dryads danced with us in the clearings we found. We played in the trees, trying to jump like squirrels from branch to branch, and bruising ribs to remember that story. We made thrones out of fallen trees from tornadoes, and watched our little kingdom of branches and bark and leaves quiver in the sunlight.

Daddy taught us the names of the trees and the vines, and we learned to weave crowns for ourselves, and make bows and arrows like our Choctaw and Cherokee ancestors may have done. Mommy taught us the names of the birds that lived in our trees, and I would spend hours lying on a fallen tree trunk trying to teach myself to whistle at the mockingbirds. (I still can’t whistle.) We learned to climb the clay hills and walk across corners of cotton fields to explore new places. Daddy said it was the Scots-Irish blood in us that drove us to explore the woods and creeks and fields around us. Really, it was the magic of it all. Poking acorns into the rich soil the Mississippi River had washed over the Delta and up over the bluff, and watching a tiny oak tree come up the next spring is a magical thing for children.

I remember that as a child on the way to visit my great-grandmother in McComb, Mississippi, I would press my face up as close as I could to the windows of our car and pray that God would give me green eyes like the pine trees in McComb. I thought that the haunted, emerald-green pine trees were the most beautiful trees I had ever seen. Now, I'm older. I'm content with the Irish skin I inherited from my mother's side of the family--as pale as the stripped and shivering birch trees. My eyes are the color of the live oak tree's leaves before a tornado passes over in the middle of summer, and I’m okay with that.

I've grown up, now. I don't go into the woods to my throne I once worked so hard to smooth. I don't fight through the thorns to climb into the cedar tree where I bruised my ribs. I don't lie out next to my rose garden on the edge of the woods and watch the mockingbirds, and laugh at the blue jays.

But the trees haven't changed. Yes, they've gotten a little taller, a little older, a few more have gotten struck by lightening, and two more have fallen to the summer storms. But they haven't left. The oak trees still stand solemnly like our courthouse on the square. The pine trees still seem to judge the other trees for not being as tall or straight. The birch trees giggle and peek around the others, happy to stay under the oak tree's canopies. The magnolias smile down at the citizens of their state, and get ready to hand them flowers bigger than dinner plates.The dogwoods sit in their hollows and wish for Easter to come a little sooner so they can be noticed again. As much as I feel like I've changed as I've grown up--the trees don't. Maybe they'll get a little taller--a little thicker--some will get kudzu or honeysuckle or poison ivy growing up them, but they're not going anywhere.

The trees are a lot like the people of Mississippi that they watch over. God made them all different. Some stand a little taller, some slump a little more, a few are slender, a few more are thicker, many are a little crooked, many more are straight and tall. There are different colors, different patterns, different ages, but they're all still people and they all stand quietly by watching the world turn. We've lived here for generations, some of us. Toes in the Delta soil, growing up listening to Grandaddy's ghost stories about the Wampuss Cat, and Mommy's warnings about staying away from "The River". We're content in who we are, in where we've stood. History has flowed around us just as steadily as Old Man River defines our western border.

But what use is a pine tree that grows on a tree farm and never gets harvested to go make a house or a porch or a barn? What use is an oak tree that stands in the middle of somewhere a neighborhood needs to grow? What use are we as Mississippians if we don't stand up and help change the course of history a bit?

When I was very little, we were picking my Daddy up at the Jackson International Airport. It was Christmas Eve, and he had been able to come home for our Christmas after three days flying packages all over the United States for other people's Christmases. As we drove away, Daddy's pilot's suitcase safely tucked away in our trunk, I began to read huge posters on the side of the exit road.

"Yes, we wear shoes. A few of us even wear cleats."

"Yes, we can read. A few of us can even write."

This led me to ask Mommy why they would need to post these things on huge posters hanging from light poles. Of course we wear shoes and read and write. Of course we wear cleats. My mother had to explain to me that people that were from outside Mississippi had a very negative view of our state. That people said horrible things and bad words about the way we treated our people. I asked why Mississippi people hadn't stood up for themselves. At that age, I would have tried to fight anyone that called me or any one of my sisters or classmates any kind of name, and I was seriously considering beating the holiday stuffing out of those people that dared impugn my beautiful Mississippi.

But Mommy quickly told me that was not the way to do it. You can catch more flies with honey. I was wrong to say mean things about people when I hadn't even been to their state either. So I was quiet, and I thought. And as I began growing up I thought some more. I wondered as we drove west through Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, and Yellowstone. I observed as we drove north to see sights from the Revolutionary War, stopping in New York and detouring through Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. I watched as we flew west to ski in the Colorado Rockies, and drove west another time to visit the Grand Canyon, New Mexico, and Utah. I sat on the edge of my seat as I flew across the Atlantic Ocean, Europe, and the Middle East to land in South East Asia and tour a land of golden temples. I excitedly held my sisters' hands as we all flew across the Atlantic again to Great Britain and rode trains around Scotland and England. I laughed through a summer living in the Philippines, and I wondered through a semester in London.

Each time I came back to Mississippi. The trees and the people were the same: welcoming, kind, content, stationery. I could sit under the oak trees and tell stories of far off lands, and still listen to the re-telling of that one time Great-Grandma Turner scared Great-Uncle Sherman witless by dressing up like a witch. Just as each tree has a story to tell of how it grew, what it has seen, and what it dreams to be--so does every single person in Mississippi.

Only thing is--we're not trees.

And I think we forget that. We're not made to stay in the same place our entire lives. We are humans made to explore and dream about the world around us and tell our stories to the world. The trees will always be here. With more deer than people in our state, I don't think we have to worry too much about that. They've stood watching generations of us grow up, they'll watch a few more.

There will always be Mississippi to come home to. I know that. For no matter how far away I follow God to, I know I'm alway welcome to come back. My head may be in the clouds, but my roots are deep in the Mississippi soil next to the trees I grew up under.