Scarlett O'Hara On Prozac

Grieving For The Motherland

I'm an Alabama girl. I always have been. Even when I lived in Chattanooga, TN for nigh on twenty years, I still told everyone "I'm from Alabama." Most people try to cover up their humble origins, but not me. I was always proud of being an Alabamian. As I grew older, this pride expanded to include most of the South (except Florida, but that's another post.)

I never understood why anyone would choose to live anywhere else. I knew the cities up north were more densely populated, but I figured they had to be. As cold as it got in the upper parts of the fifty states, I assumed more people were needed to huddle together for warmth. Occasionally, people would venture down to our fair land, with their pushy, arrogant ways and sounding as if their mama taught them to speak by holding a clothespin on their nose. More often than not, these people stayed, giving rise to the adage, "What's the difference between a Yankee and a Damn Yankee?"

I always felt a bit sorry for these poor creatures. They didn't know anything. They didn't know about barbecue, or sweet tea, or Saturday afternoon football and Sunday morning church being a package deal. They didn't know how to say, 'ya'll' or use it properly in a sentence. Invariably, they would make the dreaded faux pas of saying "you all" as if that somehow sufficed. Even worse, they often acted as if they'd landed right in the middle of Dogpatch and expected us natives to be carrying pigs around in our arms, cooking up moonshine behind the coalshed and dating our cousins.

But Southerners aren't stupid. Some of the greatest writers this country produced came from the South, and these people have college classes devoted to studying their work. One of the most famous books ever written, Gone With The Wind, was written by a Southern woman who knew how to capture the inflections and the colloquialisms and the intricacies of Southern manners. Which is a far cry from the way Hollywood portrays Southerners, by using half-smart liberal actors and actresses to sashay about, drawling out their vowels until you could take a nap on them and calling each other, "you all." And while I have known a few young men who welded their car doors shut for fun, the real South is not like the Dukes of Hazzard.

But, I digress. I loved growing up in the South. I loved living there as an adult. And if anyone ever told me, "You will fall in love with a Yankee and move to Northern Illinois" I would have sniffed their breath and taken their car keys. Marry a Yankee? That would have been worse than marrying a criminal!

And then, I met the one person in the world who could make me change my mind. As a result, my life has taken a bizarre turn. Just as Dorothy went Over The Rainbow, I went over the Mason Dixon line and found myself in a world filled with strange people with even stranger habits. And I sometimes wonder if I will ever go home again...

posted by Zoe Richardson @ 3:41 PM