THE ADVERTISER arrived today — my weekly report from home. Holmes County’s weekly newspaper is a lot less local than when it was shepherded by four generations of the Williams family, especially now that it’s ended up as part of the Gannett empire.

Thank goodness for Hazel Tison.

Mrs. Tison was just beginning her career as an English teacher when I started writing for the Advertiser during my senior year of high school. Now, in retirement, she writes a column for the paper she calls the Happy Corner. It’s always a trip back home, usually featuring familiar people or places or things to eat.

This week her headline was “Recipe for Shrimp Bisque.” That seemed like a highfalutin offering in a rural county where we more often eat fried chicken and butterbeans. The column was a lesson in making substitutions “if you don’t have every little thing they call for” in a recipe. When checking to see if she had the makings for shrimp bisque, Mrs. Tison wrote, she found she didn’t have shrimp stock, so she used chicken stock. She didn’t have leeks, but she had a sweet white onion. She didn’t have tomato paste, but she had a can of tomato soup.

She certainly didn’t have one-fourth cup of cognac or brandy or sherry. “Don’t know what the first one is and don’t have the brandy or sherry,” she wrote. “But there is a little scuppernong wine in the refrigerator left over from the Christmas fruit cake. That’ll do.”

We didn’t know what bisque was when I was growing up in Esto. I’m sure of it. At my first important business dinner after graduating from law school, I found myself dining with a phalanx of big-city lawyers, staring down a French menu. Lobster bisque sounded fancy and surely would impress my new colleagues. So I told the waiter I’d start with the lobster beesque. “Very well, sir, the bisque then.” I turned a thousand shades of red, and I’m certain I heard a few snickers.

All these years and miles later, we still call it beesque in our household, even though it’s really pronounced bisque, as in biscuits.

I should have known.

EARLIER: “From Esto to the Advertiser“

Ethel Hughes stands by the well in front of her house in Esto.

MY GRANDMOTHER LIVED in a little white Jim Walter house just behind the old brick stores on the north side of the railroad tracks in Esto. I loved her, and spent more time when I was growing up at Mama’s house than I did at home. It was a safe and loving place, and there was always something good to eat on her stove.

In 1956 — a year after I was born — Uncle John Hughes arranged for a new house to be built behind the old unpainted wood-frame house that stood in the front yard. My grandmother and grandfather had lived in the old house since 1937 and raised four children there: my mother, known in the family as Doll; Uncle Bill, whose real name was James; Uncle John, who was the most fun; and Uncle Leonard, the baby.

The new house was special for our part of the world because it had indoor plumbing. My grandfather was said to have objected to bringing that sort of business inside the house, since they had a perfectly good outhouse in the back yard.

That story I can’t prove, but I now know the dates for certain. A few days ago an unexpected priority mail box arrived. It contained a handful of photographs, some faded newspaper clippings, and a few old papers that had been saved when they cleaned out Uncle Leonard’s house in Hartford, Alabama, 10 miles north, after he died last year. Among the papers was the application for a tax deed on the property dated August 2, 1937.

Also in the box was the original contract between my grandfather, James Cullen Hughes, and the Jim Walter Corp. dated July 31, 1956. The house cost a grand total of $3,358.40, with $50 down and monthly payments of $55.14 over the next five years.

It was a simple house with three small bedrooms, a small living room, a kitchen/dining room and the aforementioned bathroom, with tub and toilet. The contract says it was a “Capri” model measuring 24×32, or just 768 square feet, but it was big enough to hold a lot of love.

Many people in our part of the world lived in Jim Walter homes. They could be ordered from a pattern book or from the Sears Roebuck catalog. Jim Walter, a Tampa businessman, had started the company in 1946 after World War II ended and soldiers came home to pursue the American Dream, but needed housing. Thousands of Jim Walter homes were built in the following decades on lots people already owned in rural areas throughout the South. The company finally went bust after the 2008 financial crisis.

That little white house provided shelter for our family for many years — and some of my warmest childhood memories.

With first cousin Paul Hughes in our backyard in Esto on my 8th birthday. He was 6.

DR. J. PAUL HUGHES had a head start on life by being born to parents who lived in Esto, an idyllic little town on the Alabama-Florida line. They lived on the south side of the railroad tracks, near the Wellses and some of the Kirklands. Motor and Humpy Pitts also lived nearby, a little farther back into the woods.

Paul’s grandparents, Ethel and Cullen Hughes, lived a couple of blocks away, if we’d had blocks back then in Esto. So did his father’s sister, known in the family as Doll, who was my mother. Paul and I were close in age — I’m two years older — and we were playmates as far back as I can remember.

What I recall most fondly about Paul’s early years is when Uncle Leonard and Aunt Sarah bought him a swimming pool — just a little above-ground tin-sided round pool that held about two feet of water, but it seemed rich in a time and place where swimming was done in Ten Mile Creek. Paul and I spent hours in that pool, which sat out in their yard beside a big stinky gardenia bush. Our favorite game was to hold our noses and dive underwater, looking to be the first to find the bottle cap one of us had thrown backwards over our shoulder.

As we got a little older, our hobbies grew more sophisticated. We began collecting and identifying rocks we found on nearby dirt roads. We used our crayons to draw flags from countries around the world. Eventually we took up stamp collecting. We claimed a corner of Mama and Papa’s junk house and set up the H&R Hobby Shop. Why his name came first I can’t imagine, although it’s true he always was a little smarter.

Wells Grocery Store sat just beside Mama’s house. One day Mr. Wells decided to put in a coin laundry. The washers and dryers came in huge cardboard boxes, and we had weeks of fun playing in those big boxes.

Perhaps inevitably, Esto became too small for Paul. He and his parents moved across the state line to Hartford, Alabama, about 10 miles north. We thought they were puttin’ on airs by moving to town, but off they went, and into a new brick house, no less. Our play days were over.

But we remained friends. Years later, after he’d finished college and medical school, he came to live with me in Chicago for a few months while he interned at Cook County Hospital. By then our hobbies and interests were considerably more refined. I especially remember dollar pitchers of beer at Streeter’s Tavern on Thursday nights.

He became a brilliant physician, an astute investor and a talented musician who played many instruments and recorded quite a few albums. But he never lost his taste for beer. It did him in, at only 61, three days before Christmas. He will be buried this morning near home in the Hartford cemetery.

OBITUARY | Dr. J. Paul Hughes (1957-2018)