It’s the Little Things

Written By Susan Mah

In less than two weeks, I will close out this Mississippi chapter of my life and be onto Chapter 10—back to California and then who knows where. As I reflect on my time here, I’ve been making lists of things I’ll miss and things I won’t. So far, this is what I’ve got, in no particular order:

Things I’ll miss:

  • Recipes involving Fritos

  • Knowing my neighbors; having good relationships with them

  • People doing nice things and expecting nothing in return

  • Community spirit

  • Homemade biscuits and cornbread

  • No traffic; every place being 15 minutes away

  • Local pharmacy (not corporate-owned)

  • Fireplace in my bedroom

  • Littlejohn’s

  • Wise Women

  • My favorite restaurants (thank you: City Grocery, Grit, Snackbar, Jinsei, St Leo, Volta, and Good Day Cafe)

  • Running into people I know

  • The Square

  • Dogwoods and irises

  • Hearing different kinds of birds when I wake up in the morning

  • Woods around my house

  • Ease of doing business with people

  • Owning a home and having a big yard

  • Daily hikes with my dogs

  • Going to the club for swimming and steak

  • Polite and respectful kids

  • Sounds of crickets and frogs at night

  • The way light shows up on ripples of a lake

  • Seeing kids doing wholesome activities

  • Yoknapatawpha Arts Council

Things I won’t miss:

  • Microaggressions

  • Slow reaction times

  • Fried food

  • Worst allergies EVER

  • Heat/humidity; freezing winters

  • Pickup trucks

  • Khakis, polos, and baseball caps

  • Red/white/blue clothing

  • Confederate soldier statue on the Square

  • Lack of platonic male/female friendships

  • MAGA

  • Fundamentalist Christianity; the hypocrisy

  • The homogeneity

  • Social divisions

  • Restaurants without non-dairy creamer

  • Cheese or sugar in every recipe

  • Mosquitoes and ticks

  • The passivity (see prior blog, 4/17/26)

  • Frank hunting and eating animals

  • People voting red

  • Lack of education

  • Highly gendered roles

  • Obsession with football

  • Lack of dating options

Like I always tell my patients, there is no such thing as all good or all bad—it’s always a mixture of both, and you have to find the mix that works for you. Recently, a friend and I were talking about what unconditional love means and she said, “Isn’t there always an X?”—meaning, isn’t there always something negative in the midst of a sea of positive? I had never thought about it that way, but I guess she’s right.

With that in mind…Oxford, my love for you is unconditional. But as divorcing couples often say, “I love them, but I’m just not IN love anymore.”

Susan Mah
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