Editor’s note: The essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.

On the day I am writing this, Monday, Feb. 2, 2026, I sit in Georgia in a warm home surrounded by my three dogs, my partner and my best friend. Tonight, I will make my partner’s favorite soup – cioppino, a fish stew developed in San Francisco by Italian and Spanish immigrants.

Yesterday, I drove from my mother’s home in Lake Village, Arkansas, to my home in Oxford, Mississippi, before heading on to Georgia. I had not seen my home in Oxford since Friday, Jan. 23.

As Winter Storm Fern approached, as forecasters issued dire warnings for the storm’s potential impact on northern Mississippi, my mother called me Thursday, Jan. 22, telling me to drive to her house the next day. “You remember 1994,” she asked, “when we were without power for seven days huddled around a fireplace cooking beans on a camper stove?” Yes, I said, I remembered. “Well, I would come here now if I were you. We’ve got a generator.”

No matter how old I am, like a good son, I listened to mama. It wasn’t guaranteed that Lake Village would be spared, and to be clear, we were iced in on undrivable roads for a good 72 hours. (Those who live their daily lives across rivers know that traveling over an icy bridge, especially the scale of the ones that crisscross the mighty Mississippi, is hubris, a folly).

But as we now know, Fern wreaked the most havoc on a very specific strip of interstate geography, stretching from northeast Louisiana into the Mississippi Delta up through Oxford and northeast Mississippi and on up to Nashville, Tennessee. Fortunately, my mother’s house in southeast Arkansas never lost power, and my decision to leave Oxford proved to be a fortunate one.  

On Sunday, Feb. 1, nine days later, I was finally able to return to my home in Oxford. Full of anxiety, I drove up the county road to the east of Oxford. Limbs and detritus covered the roadside. Tree damage in Fern’s hardest hit areas like Oxford will take months if not years to document. It is immeasurable and catastrophic.

As I rounded the crest of the hill atop which my house sits, I began to see the house’s gold siding peeking through the tree line on my right. On my left, I first saw a pine tree still bending in submission to the elements, struggling but defiant in its efforts to stand tall again. Further ahead, in front of my house’s half-circular drive, I saw the old growth pine trees, over 100 feet tall, still standing. As I pulled into the drive, I could tell the house was intact: No trees had fallen on the house from the woods that envelop the golden cabin.

I was lucky. Inside, no pipes had burst, but the power was still off – the thermostat measured a chilly 33 – but I am blessed and grateful I did not have to endure more than a week of such temperatures. That wasn’t the case in February 1994. 

1994

I was 6 years old then; my younger brother had just turned 2 and my sister was 9. At that time, we lived in a home in Greenville in the Mississippi Delta.

I remember the blue kitchen, and the towel holder by the sink was in the shape of a white goose’s neck. I remember the marigold ceramic tile of the bathroom and the green and burgundy color scheme of my parents’ bedroom. I remember the juniper bush in front of our living room windows and the great live oak tree in the front yard. I remember the paneled den, which had been added onto the house before my parents bought it. The den with a wood-burning brick fireplace at the end of it jutted from the back of the house.

The room gave lodge vibes, and I remember my mother hung paintings of ducks and a quilted tapestry on the walls. The new den’s backdoor slider, to the right, led to the backyard where I could often be found at that age on the swing set listening through headphones to Bette Midler sing on my red Sony Walkman cassette player.

But for more than a week in February 1994, my two siblings, my parents and I were stuck indoors. As Dr. Seuss writes in The Cat in the Hat, “The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So, we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day.” So, as the ice storm of 1994 shut off power for many homes across the Delta, we sat in the house, huddling for warmth.

The den’s fireplace was our only heat source. My dad kept a fire going, and my parents hung a giant blanket to cover the room’s opening to the rest of the house to contain the heat. We existed for those seven days without electricity in that one room, cooking beans and canned goods on my dad’s camper stove, sleeping on pallets as close to the fireplace as possible, stoking the embers, reigniting the flames when needed, playing games awkwardly in layers of clothing, listening to the battery-powered radio for entertainment. We read books, perhaps Dr. Seuss among them. We kids left the room sparingly to go to the bathroom or to bathe. My father went outside to gather wood or assess damage or check on neighbors. Power lines and poles were down across our neighborhood, the town and the region. Trees fractured beneath their icy burdens. 

Russell L. Pfost of the National Weather Service called it “The Disastrous Mississippi Ice Storm of 1994.” This 1994 disaster in Mississippi claimed at least nine lives.

Though we were without power for seven days, it took some homes more than a month to regain power, with nearly 750,000 customers without power at some point in north Mississippi. Parts of the state received from 3 to 6 inches of ice accumulation, and the full accounting of the storm’s damage would take years to comprehend.

According to data collected by the National Weather Service in the storm’s aftermath: “Over 8,000 utility poles were pulled down by the weight of the ice, and over 4,700 miles of lines were downed. About 490 water systems were impacted, with as many as 741,000 customers without water at some point.”

1994, 2026

Even before Fern impacted Mississippi, people like my mother were warning 2026 could be like 1994. Storm-planning mode went into overdrive. Electricians were working around the clock to connect backup generators to homes “just in case.”

In Oxford, both the Kroger and Walmart quickly sold out of bottled water and other food items. I went to Kroger on a Tuesday night, more than three days before Fern’s arrival, and many shelves were already empty.

I asked students in one of my classes what they planned to do for the storm that was coming. Most of them did not seem worried; they planned to huddle together as a group at one friend’s house. Another student, however, asked, “Do you remember ’94?” I said, “Yes, I was a kid, but I do; we were without power for a week.” She said, “My mom said the same thing.” I added, “If this turns out to be anything like that was, y’all need more of a plan than huddling at a house. That’s a start, but you need to think about a safe heat source, nonperishable food, having a stockpile of any needed medications, what you’ll do if the water goes out, etc.” She smiled while other students seemed suspect of their older instructor’s warnings. The confidence of youth, perhaps, or a skepticism shaped by our digital age. 

1994, 2026 … 1951

Only time can provide the full story of Winter Storm Fern’s effects on Mississippi, but we can hear echoes from the past in Fern’s aftermath. According to historians, prior to 1994, the worst winter storm to hit Mississippi happened at the end of January 1951. They called it the “Great Southern Glaze Storm.” It was linked to 25 deaths and resulted in $100 million in damage (more than $1 billion today). As with 2026, Nashville was hit hard, with 8 inches of ice and snow measured in the city at the storm’s zenith. In its wake, the Great Glaze left a 100-mile-wide, 4-inch-thick ice sheet that stretched from Texas to West Virginia. Though damage occurred in many states, as meteorologist Ben W. Harlin wrote in 1952: “It was the Southland that suffered most in human misery and property damage.” 

When historians write the story of Winter Storm Fern in 2026, it will likely be a stretch of our “Southland” with Oxford at its bullseye that will have suffered the most human misery and property damage. For now, we are all in recovery mode. The historians will have to wait. 

I wasn’t alive in 1951; my students weren’t alive in 1994; more than likely my parents won’t be alive for the next one in 30-plus years (if it takes that long for another disastrous winter storm to hit Mississippi). In sharing our stories, I hope we can build a molecular memory across generations as an ethic of climate responsibility and accountability to ourselves and others in our beloved “Southland.”

My grandmother used to like to say to me ‘Remember where you have been.’ She was an English teacher in Cleveland, Mississippi, all her life, and she taught us that the traces of every place we inhabit move with and within us. She knew, too, the importance of the past in shaping the future and the necessity for multiple storytellers to contribute to what we know of any given event.

My family’s story is but one story of 1994, one story of 2026. What is yours? Perhaps there could be a series of “Ice Storm” family narratives featured across our timelines and newsfeeds: a string of storytelling lights to come out of a disaster that plunged so many of us into literal darkness.

I’ve come to amend my grandmother’s imperative. It isn’t only remembering where you have been but who you have been with and who you could not have been without. I am grateful to the families in all their forms that shelter, sustain, nourish.

This, to me, is the meaning of care. I know I would have fared far worse without my family in 1994 and my families (in Arkansas, in Mississippi, in Georgia, in Florida) in 2026. 

Now that I’ve lived through two of these ice storms – once as a kid, once as a grown man – it seems to me that we would do well to remember that the infrastructure we rely on comes in multiple forms. Infra, from the Latin for beneath or under, structure.

Perhaps most obvious, we rely on a tangible infrastructure that supports or makes possible the structures we move through daily: power lines, utility poles, internet broadband, satellites in space, cellular data and water pipes we hope withstand the ground’s cruel freeze. We rely on roadways unburdened by ice and rights of way unoccluded by fallen trees, splintered poles or live wires. We rely on easy access to food supply, from what is available in grocery stores in both normal and abnormal times to what we can safely prepare when we cannot use all the routine cooking tools at our disposal. We rely on flushing toilets, heated water and lights that work by the simple flick of a switch.

We recognize the centrality of this tangible infrastructure in our lives perhaps most clearly when we are without it, when it has suddenly been pulled out from under us. 

But moments like 1994, like 2026, reveal our equally important reliance on an intangible infrastructure – something more than just the “material stuff” – that shapes our lives in often far less obvious ways.

We might call this an “infrastructure of care,” a structure of feeling and embodied practice that underlies our connection to one another. My thoughts here borrow from ideas in feminist ethics of care such as Emma Power’s “Caring-with” in which care becomes less an individual responsibility and more a “distributed achievement” and infrastructure functions “not [only] as a dimension of urban technology [poles, wires, pipes, roadways] but a dimension of everyday life” (Graham & McFarlane, 2015: ix).

“Caring-with” or an “infrastructure of care” isn’t about naming the heroic acts of individual actors but tracing the pattern or textures of a general fabric of care in which individuals may contribute a thread or stitch here or there in an ethic of shared responsibility. I am reminded of words from Carson McCullers, one of my favorite writers, in the 1958 play “The Square Root of Wonderful”: “The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.” 

In 1994, I glimpsed this infrastructure of care at work through the eyes of a 6-year-old child. I remember my dad checking on our widowed next-door neighbor who lived alone with her Scottish terrier. On sunny days, “Scottie” would be running in the front yard as wild as we kids did. But in 1994, the utility pole had fallen on the tree in her front yard, and my dad made sure she didn’t go near the newly forged tree-pole until the electric company could ensure it was safe.

I remember similar moments of neighbors checking on neighbors, walking door to treacherous door in an era before cellphones helped us stay in touch. I remember hearing about men leaving their families when the roads were safe enough to drive to go help those in need wherever they may be and whoever they may have been. I remember extended family relaying messages to each other as best they could that they were safe and warm even if their power had also gone out.

This was the era of the walky-talky, and walky-talky we kids did! I remember my grandmother – safe with my grandfather in Cleveland – most worried about the frost on her prize-winning rose garden. Would the Queen Elizabeth rose bush come back with the thaw?

In 2026, we might ask a similar question: Will the trees of Oxford’s beloved Grove prove resilient? 

In 1994, we cared for one another and allowed ourselves to receive care in return but not because we saw ourselves as doing something “important” but because it was just what we did: It was the fabric of who we were. In 2026, this infrastructure of care manifested similarly, despite the arguably deeper divisions that now plague our society. 

After Fern’s icy deluge, I personally received numerous text messages and phone calls from all corners of my life, from colleagues and friends in Mississippi and Georgia, from folks I know intimately to those I don’t know very much at all. For example, my mom’s neighbor texted, “We’ve got plenty of whiskey if you need it.” Now, that’s carework indeed!

On a more serious note, I witnessed neighbors checking on neighbors and observed community organizing at its most resilient, from those with four-wheel-drive trucks leaving their own powerless homes to transport those trapped in homes without power to warming centers to businesses providing free food to those in need. I observed the fierce leadership of both campus and community administrators. I marveled at more senior colleagues inviting junior colleagues into their homes, and I, too, was the recipient of such literally warm invitations.

This infrastructure of care – both those in Oxford checking on each other and helping out in the most mundane of ways to those from out of town coming to Oxford’s rescue – is an evolving story, one that I hope will continue to grow and endure for generations to come.

Disasters like 1994 and 2026 remind us that though the lights can go out and wreak havoc on our lives, the lights can come back on again if we practice patience, allow the professionals to do their work and remember our responsibility to each other. Through both the restoration of tangible infrastructure and the care work of intangible infrastructure, we have the power to turn the lights on again.

I think of what my mother wrote on the final image of our Ice Storm 1994 family photo album, “There is Light Again!” Sure, the lights worked again after the linemen fixed the electrical grid, but now I understand my mother’s words more expansively. In my own family, that time together huddled as one unit seemed to bring about a lightness, a buoyancy, among us kids, despite the labor and worry of our parents and the ecological tragedy unfolding outside.

My siblings and I grew closer together that week. We came to appreciate “play” in a new way. We used our imaginations and our sensorium differently. Without the visual dominance of television screens, our ears grew more attuned as we listened to radio programs.

In short, we kids were all right. So, too, will be your kids who may have spent a few days or weeks without power in 2026. In fact, they too may learn how to survive, imagine and move through the world anew. 

More broadly, like we kids in 1994 who had to use our imaginations anew, perhaps moments like this invite us as a society to collectively reimagine when, how and to what extent we should care for one another – every single man, woman and child – no matter what (natural, man-made or politically motivated) disasters befall us.

Eric Solomon, PhD, is a graduate of Emory University and the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the University of Mississippi. He grew up in the Mississippi Delta and is a lifelong Southerner. His work has been featured in Southern Cultures, Southern Spaces, south, South Atlantic Review, Studies in the Literary Imagination, Mississippi Quarterly, the North Carolina Literary Review, among others. Solomon is an instructor of English and Southern Studies at Ole Miss.