South is Home – Home is South

I was introduced, through the fine people at It’s a Southern Thing to Sean of the South.  (You should check out their 9 great Facebook pages for people who love the south)

Sean is a storyteller.  He tells stories about the South.  I can’t describe to you the effect these stories have had on me.  Earlier tonight I was driving, listening to his most recent podcast and I just started crying.  I can’t explain it.  It just moved me that deeply to hear someone that sounds like me, that’s from where I’m from (I’m pretty sure he lives in Walton County), tell simple stories about people that I’ve known all my life.  It might just be a story about a diner in South Alabama, or a group of High School kids singing at Hank Williams’ grave, but these are sacred stories.

I tried to write a note to him to explain what, exactly, he has come to mean to me in less than 12 hours, but I ended up writing something that may just sound too much like him.

So I didn’t send it.

But I still like it, so you get to read it.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the last few months about what, exactly, it means to be from the South.  I still don’t think that I have it figured out, but maybe, just maybe, this is the start of my getting some ideas down.

——

I live in Virginia these days, but it’s not the South.  Not really.  South is home.  South is Choctawhatchee Bay and the smell of shrimp.  It’s longleaf pines. It’s my grandparents’ house in Prattville. It’s cornbread and greens and fried mullet.

I married a Yankee girl.  Her daddy is a Methodist Preacher in Pennsylvania.  She is the sweetest woman in the world.  She loves barbeque and Jason Isbell.  She tolerates Hank and my need to fry everything.  She’s the guide-star to my ever wandering bark.

But she doesn’t like cornbread and thinks that grits should always have cheese in them.  I love her.  To the moon and back.  More than pie.  But she doesn’t get it.  Doesn’t understand that Home is more than a place.  That it’s an identity, a way of being.  The duality of, to borrow a phrase, the “Southern Thing.”

In the morning, on the drive down a two-lane country highway along the James River, I’ll play her one of your podcasts.  And later in the week, I’ll make cornbread anyway.  Because she may not get it, but she loves me.  And she loves Jesus.

I guess that’s all that really matters.

At least she loves sweet tea.