When I was a teenager, I didn’t always feel like I fit in my hometown. Somewhere around 9th grade, I found a squad, but they were other dreamers, and bookworms, and folks who just barely walked the line between goody-two-shoes AND rebels. I left for college and the big wide world really thinking I’d never be back… not because I wanted to live in a big city, or move away from my family (I wanted NEITHER of those things) but because I wanted a posse of like-minded, similar interested folks and thought I could find them somewhere else.
I DID find those wonderful, fun, amazing people in various places I’ve lived (how did I get so lucky?) but now my people are spread around the country from San Francisco to Virginia to Atlanta as we’ve all migrated closer to our own families and roots. Now I’m home again, and I’m pretty excited to say that Laurel may not have been what I thought it was all along. Or maybe it was, but a crew of dreamers, artists, and big thinkers stayed behind, working little by little to make it into the town and community they’d always wished for.
Either way, Laurel, Mississippi is buzzing these days. HGTV has come calling, there are artists opening up shops downtown, there’s a butcher for heavens-sakes… and in a community that’s always had pretty stringent blue laws and fairly negative mindsets about social drinking, Brett and I are BEYOND pumped about what’s happening in the old radio station. …
