From the world keeps getting smaller department:

Annette Carter Pierce walked into the office last Friday and asked for “Hunt Howell.” Such an inquiry raises questions around here because staff members know that’s the name of my grandson.

However, the Hunt for whom Annette was asking was my dad, the late Hunt Howell, by whose nickname his great-grandson is also known.

Annette is a Panola native who once went to Alcorn University to further her education. When she finished school in 1970 she ended up staying in southwest Mississippi, becoming a school teacher in nearby Fayette.

Our dad was in the newspaper business in Fayette before he moved us to Batesville in 1955 to become a partner with the late Bud Pearson and Howard Mize in The Panolian. Dad published The Fayette Chronicle before moving to Batesville.

Even though Annette arrived in Fayette 15 years after we had moved from there, people would occasionally ask her, when they learned that she was from Batesville, if she knew Hunt Howell. She did not then, but before his death in 2002, she had met him and they had had a pleasant conversation invoking mutual friends.

I spent early formative years in Fayette, attending the first grade in the same building where Annette would later teach. My brother Rupert was born while we lived there, in nearby Port Gibson. About four years ago I heard from a group of Fayette natives who have since moved away and learned that they periodically hold reunions. We compared memories and photos via e-mail. In one correspondence, I observed that Fayette occupied a space in my memory disproportionate to the small number of years I spent there. Others among my correspondents agreed.

Annette has been similarly entranced by the small Jefferson County town during her years there, she told Rupert and me during her visit. She has lately been in Batesville at the family’s homeplace near Old Stage Coach and Barnacre Roads attending her bachelor brother, Malachi Carter, caring for him during a period of his declining health. This newspaper carried his obituary a few weeks ago. She was seeking extra copies of that edition when she stopped by and made the inquiry that led to these words.

Malachi was one of 14 siblings in the Carter family. After Malachi’s death, Annette now has four surviving brothers and four surviving sisters, she said.

Joe, Frank, Ottowa and Albert Carter and Mattie Carter Brownlee, all live in Panola County. Sisters Edna Carter Preston and Joyce Carter Walker live in Memphis and Nennie Carter Reed lives at Coldwater.

The name of another brother, Bryant W. Carter, is etched into the stone of the downtown War Memorial Monument, one of 11 from Panola to have died in the Korean War.

We visited, talked about people we both know from Fayette — Mr. Albert Lehmann, now on his way to celebrating his 103 birthday, and Marie Knapp among them. It is a conversation that I look forward to taking up with her again during another visit. In the interim I plan to find my school annual from the first grade so that I can show Annette the photos. It is the kind of conversation once initiated, easily rekindled.

Her visit was one of those deja-vu-all-over-again moments when an event so seemingly distant unites present company in a pleasant reunion over people and places fondly shared in memory.

Annette still has her house in Fayette, where she was married and widowed. She also has a place at the family home here, placing her in something of a dilemma. Now that her brother no longer requires her care, should she return to Fayette, stay in Batesville? Or both?

I hope she chooses the latter. Either place would be diminished by her absence.