Incoherent Ramblings

I am a girl born in “The South”.  I speak with an accent, thanks to 4 years of college with my best friend, Amy Jo (yes, that’s her real name). Growing up I heard, “Where are you from? You talk fuuunny?”  My response, “I talk like the rest of my family, YOU talk funny.” I did develop a twang, but even now, it’s not as bad as some of my friends.  I don’t know that I would call myself a true “Southern Girl”, as there are many qualities of such that I don’t possess.

First of all, and the main reason for revocation of my Southern Girl membership, I do NOT like grits.  I not only don’t like them; I HATE them. I would have to be starving for days to even consider eating them, and even then I’d probably wait another day or two.   I was the sort of child (and the same sort of adult) who I would NOT eat something I didn’t like.  If I don’t like it, that’s all there is to it.  I have gone hungry and thirsty more than once because something I didn’t care for was served at a meal.

The second reason and one the largest number of people find most abhorrent and unacceptable: I don’t drink sweet tea or as it is also known, sugar tea.  I never have drank and never will.  It tastes like drinking syrup. I prefer mine strong, unsweetened, lots of ice and NO lemon, thankyouverymuch.

Now, most people are aware that girls in The South grow up on football.  I was raised by a group of women from Indiana, so I was raised up on basketball.  I hate football, and all things football-related, except tail-gaiting; that is ONE southern trait I DO possess, the love of a good party! I don’t care who wins, loses, who is ranked,etc.  I live in a VERY college football oriented town, so it is everywhere! I do like home game days because the stores are little more empty, and I can find a good parking spot.

I can’t fry chicken or make white gravy.

I do have some Southern Girl traits, but I think not enough to make me full-fledged, which I could never be anyway, because my generation of the family is the first born in The South, so I wouldn’t qualify regardless. I can plant a seed in a man’s mind, and he’ll think he came up with it on his own.  I know how to bait a hook, skin a catfish; I’ve sat in a deer stand, bored to tears mind you.  I’ve checked trot lines.  I’ve caught lightning bugs.  I know a little bit about a car, and I can recognize a nice outboard motor.  I love the lowcountry of South Carolina and would claim it over any other place on the planet as home. I’m not blond haired or blue eyed.  I never went to my own débutante ball, but I did accompany a young man to his dilettante ball.  I know how to take the sting out of a fire ant bite or a bee sting.

I’m not a full-fledged Hoosier, and I can’t count my relatives back to The Original 13 Colonies.  I’m just like the majority of the country, a mutt created from an immigrant Irish grandfather and a grandmother with English bloodlines, my mother was created from them and I was created from her and a Cherokee father.  I think I’m doing okay without my pedigree.