For The Love Of Laurel

This small-town girl had big-time dreams. Little did she know she’d find them right at home.

- Erin Napier

MY HUSBAND, BEN, AND I ARE about to launch our third season of Home Town on HGTV, where we help folks in our town of Laurel, Mississippi, make and remake their houses into dreams come true. Truth to tell, the whole thing still boggles my mind. It is not at all what we thought we’d do or become when we met at Jones County Junior College.

I figured I’d be an art director for a publisher in a big city far away. Ben was a fledgling history major who volunteered on every committee on campus. I was quiet and shy, not seeking out the limelight that seemed to belong to him. He was tall (six foot six) and broad-shouldered, bearded and magnetic without ever letting it go to his head. We fell for each other hard over the course of six days and soon after transferred to Ole Miss. And that’s where we got married on a cold November day.

Ben was the son of a Methodist preacher. His family had moved around a lot, so he didn’t really have a hometown. I did: Laurel, a sleepy old place that had seen better days. Found ed in the 1880s, it had flourished when lumber mills were harvesting the area’s yellow pines. But industry moved on, and people moved out. Others might have hurried past the shuttered storefronts, but I kept seeing the myriad possibilities amid architecture that was worth preserving. What if there could be a bookstore on the corner or an Italian restaurant or a shop that sold sweet-smelling candles and soaps?

Ben and I made Laurel our home. Together, we fixed up a second-floor loft in a flatiron building in the historic district. The floorboards had nickelsize gaps, the nine-foot-tall single-pane windows were a century old and too expensive to replace, so we learned to love how the wind whispered through them in all seasons.