J.D. Mathis isn’t wild about change.

The rice broker still writes business orders longhand. And he relies on old-fashioned flip phones to reach his customers.

So what would possess him to abruptly leave the familiarity of his Cleveland home and move 130 miles away?

Because he felt his future depended on it. After a paralyzing car accident, Mathis wanted the best chance to walk again. And that desire led him to Methodist Outpatient Therapy in Flowood, a division of Methodist Rehabilitation Center in Jackson.

Andrew Pates Jr. was on the cusp of a new adventure.

Once a teacher near Chicago and later a lawyer in San Diego, the 68-year-old retiree was ready to move to Mound Bayou and build a hotel. Then a freak fall in a parking lot put everything on hold.

“I hit the back of my head and they said if I had taken the blow a little higher, I would have been DOA,” Pates said.

Instead, he survived the accident only to become “an upside down paraplegic.” His legs could move, but his upper body was rigid.

“My shoulders were frozen and getting progressively worse,” he said.

The thought of having a stroke in his 40s had never really crossed Greg Plump’s mind.

Until it happened.

“It just came out of the blue,” said Plump, who is 48. “I was working out every day and I tried to eat healthy.”

Plump has always been fit and athletic. A former Mississippi State University quarterback, he’s best remembered for taking over after Sleepy Robinson was injured in the 1992 season.

This time of year, people hardly notice the number of bird baths, pet bowls and flower pots in yards across the South.

But Dr. Art Leis and Sharon Sims see the containers as incubators for the enemy.

Many of the vessels contain squiggly colonies of mosquito larvae. And after the baby bloodsuckers hatch, they tend to bite the hand that grew them.

“If you are raising mosquitoes in your backyard, that’s where they are going to live,” said Sims, president of the Mississippi-based Mosquito Illness Alliance (MIA). “They don’t fly very far.”