I remember so many things about it.

First impressions, if you will.

Like the roads that left a skim of red film on my car.  Roads, that, fairly defined, really should be called one lane roads, although they often squeezed in two vehicles in passing.

I clearly recall turning down Longview road for the first time and encountering deep and numerous potholes.  I asked once how often the road maintainer ran over the roads to fix them.  “Maybe once a year,” was the reply.  “That’s about how often they gravel them, too.”  And I’m sure my face showed a bit of my concern when I looked at the ‘gravel’ that constituted itself in 1 inch to 1 ¼ inch size rock.  I wondered at length what they would call the stuff we put on our roads back in Kansas.  I found out later.  “Sand roads,” they called them.

Years later, I noticed the road didn’t go where it used to.  It wound around where before it had been a much straighter run.  And I remembered those potholes.  Evidently, after enough elbow clashing and stomach rattling, over time those potholes won out and the road moved over to the side of them.  The fact that the road now runs in what used to be the ditch really doesn’t matter, because you can’t much tell the difference anyway.

I remember the first time I saw Kudzu.  It made me think of some huge, mutated reptile yet to be catalogued, and was so violently green and smothering it took me years to get used to it as it slow crawled and destroyed everything in its path.  Supposedly, some guy fighting in a war on the other side of the pond brought it back home with the thought of curbing erosion with it.  I saw acres of that out-of-control stuff, with here and there in the middle of it, a mounded up long-gone shrub or maybe even a dwelling place, punctuated by here and there a half size pillar; some full-grown tree with its life slowly snuffed out as it got wrestled to the ground. I like to cried for those trees.  Because in Kansas, trees are sacred.

But that wasn’t all.  One day they told me they needed to go out and bushhog the back 40 to get rid of the weeds growing up out there.  I looked and looked for weeds in the grass and sapling trees and then I guessed it.  Those small trees were what they were calling weeds.

The first time I tried to do a little bit of manual labor in that still, southern heat still hangs heavy in my memory.  It wasn’t long and I was drenched, head to foot, in my own sweat.  I happened to go up to the door of a fine southern gentlewoman in my drenched state.  She looked me over and asked, with grave concern in her voice, what medical issue I was experiencing. “Nothing,” I said, “it’s just this heat that’s doing it to me.”  

“Son,” she said, “If you were going to live here full time, you’d learn how to glisten.  You can’t go sweating up like that and expect it to be good for your health.”

Well, I’ve tried to learn how to glisten, like she said, but about the only time I get close to that is when I hear my name called and I know something embarrassing is about to be said about me. 

I think one of the most disappointing things about that part of the country is when I go to bed.  I revert back to Kansas nights and somehow expect a weather reset like happens back at home come morning.  I get my reset all right, it’s clear to me I’m not in Kansas anymore when I step out into noon time heat and it’s not even 7 in the morning yet. 

On the flip side, though, I learned something else about their weather.  It was getting on close to wintertime and we were scheduled to make a trip down there.  I had heard, even seen and sneered privately at them, when some of them came up to my country in springtime and saw them shivering around and complaining vociferously about how cold it was.  And the thermometer read a nice balmy 60 degrees as they carried on and on.  So, I clothed myself with a bit of my foolish pride and a light jacket as I sped south to share Christmas and winter with them. 

Not anymore.  Their cold is horrible cold.  Their 40 degrees is way colder than our 10 degrees.  I mean business when I pack my coats to go spend Christmas with them these days.

I still take every chance I get to swing by the courthouse in Carrolton.  I usually come in from the west, and since the street splits and goes around the courthouse on either side, it takes a bit to get turned around and headed back west so I can look up to my left at the face in the window.  I stopped there one time and went inside to ask about it.  Legend has it that Henry Wells, a former slave, had a grievance against the town and torched the original courthouse.  Supposedly he was getting run down by a lynch mob and, fearing for his life, ran up into the attic of the new courthouse (the current courthouse today) that was almost completed, to hide.  To his horror, as he was looking out from the dark attic at his pursuers below, lightning struck the very window he looked out from.  The negative of his face, etched in that window, still looks down at me today when I drive by.

I’ve never been to a place that sucks up light at night more than when I find myself traveling down those shadowy highways with 80-foot pines on either side.  I was convinced my headlights had problems for the first several years each time I entered the area, but by now I know it ain’t them.  It’s that black night, those stoic trees, and a smudged history from almost 200 years ago that America would just as soon forget that darks out the light and makes me begin to think I’m seeing things back in those hollows that maybe really aren’t there.

We were working on machinery one day, lacked a few parts, and I suggested we run into town to get them and finish the project up.  “No,” they said, “It’s Thursday afternoon.  Everything’s closed.” 

“What for?” I asked.

“Some holiday or something,” they said.  “Been this way for as long as we remember.”

I guess time must be a bit more flexible and rusts away a little easier in those hot, hazy afternoons.

Twenty odd years ago I didn’t know what the word gumbo meant, much less any image it might conjure up in my mind.  But give me a dollop of cheese grits in the bottom of my bowl, spoon me a thick, savory mixture of shrimp, conecuh sausage, mushrooms, celery, green pepper, onion, and roux on top of that.  Set me a wedge of cornbread that was made in a cast iron skillet to the side, or on top of that gumbo depending on my mood, and I tend to take up the cry of ‘From cornmeal we are, to cornmeal we shall return’ with the best of them.  Today, I know that whole mess and the family time that goes with it is called gumbo.  And I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

Nevertheless, I was a little surprised at something I said the other evening, and I guess I realized that something, somewhere must have changed.

One of my favorite nieces asked which book I was reading.

“My Southern Journey by Rick Bragg,” I replied.  “He’s one of the best authors I know of.  He won the Pulitzer prize once.  The way he describes stuff is amazing.  But I like him most because he comes from our country and writes about the places and things from there.”

“Wait a minute,” I thought to myself.  “Did I just say ‘our’ country?”

It was then I realized something must have changed.

Now, I know all you true southerners have already turned your nose way up at my feeble expressions of the south, beings as you might say, they are said from an outsider looking in.

But I say that little change in my speech calling it ‘our’ country, without a second thought, gives me some credit in spite of all that. 

It must have something to do with being married to one of those southern gentlewomen for over 26 years now that did it to me. 

Somehow, her country has become mine, just as, I hope, mine has become hers.  I claim the good and the bad of hers, and love it just as fiercely as I do her.

I even claim I could live there for a spell, and pretty much enjoy it at that.

Just don’t you go moving my sweet tea out of my reach while I’m there.