NATCHEZ — For the first time in a long time, Irma Louise Burns is without horse and cattle.

When The Dart found the Natchez native on Merrill Street Thursday afternoon, she had only been back in her hometown for approximately six-and-a-half weeks.

After retiring from a small farm in South Carolina — a 15-acre cattle operation that would sometimes team up with a neighboring property to function as a larger farm — Burns decided to move back to the place her parents had left when she was 8.

“Why’d I move here? This is where all my family is,” she said. “Where else do you go?”

When Burns was a small child, her parents had operated a small diary farm in the Morgantown area — the property now houses an apartment complex and Adams County Christian School.

“The dairy business was very bad for some years, and as my mother said, they had borrowed money to pay borrowed money for seven years, so eventually we sold everything and moved to Florida,” she said.

Later, after she married a long-haul trucker and moved to the country, Burns needed something of her own to do, Burns picked up the cattle business on her own, this time in the meat production side instead of dairy. She would raise some cattle, and haul others for the sale barn, taking occasional horseback trips into the mountains to camp.

It was hard work, she said, and, “I loved it while I was doing it.”

“But that first cold winter after I quit, I did not miss putting the hay out.”

Burns said she’s looking for ways to get established and involved in town — “I’m not much into the bridge club thing, I’m more into power tools,” she said — but with a lot of relatives in the area Natchez just made sense.

Moving back into Natchez has been a pleasant experience — things are so much closer together than the country days when the closest grocery store was 15 miles away — but a learning one. Some things are the same, such as the Christmas tree in the middle of Main Street, while others have changed, such as the old International Paper Christmas light displays that have been moved to the bluff.

But over all, she said, Natchez doesn’t change a lot.

“It’s an old town, and if you were born here, your roots go deep.”