In fact, when I think about it, I’m always ready for change. known for the craziest football fanatics, I just don’t quite fit.Īnd the fact that we’re still here - and will continue to be here - makes me wonder if I’ll ever get the chance to discover where I do fit.Īnd so I’m very ready for a change - even if it’s only just far enough to force me to get a new drivers license. From boiled peanuts to broiling summers and never being able to buy alcohol on Sundays in the region of the U.S. ![]() But still, after ten years, she still feels a bit foreign to me. ![]() In fact, in the winter, I kind of love her. And now, after much more anticipation, it looks like The South is continuing its vicegrip hold, though it does feel like we’re slowly managing to slip northward from its grasp.Īnd look. Then, after much anticipation, we found out we were moving to North Carolina. It was ten years ago that Justin convinced me to move with him to Georgia. On the one hand, Virginia is still, technically speaking, The South. So I think it’s fairly safe to say that I have pretty mixed feelings about our upcoming move. To embrace it, even, because it represents my ability to learn and to grow and to assimilate - or, at the very least, to appreciate. Customers started looking at me strangely about halfway through their dinners, and that’s about when the inevitable, “Where’re you from?” questions started, followed with something like, “Nebraska and Minnesota, eh? Those’re somewhere’n the middle, right?” smile-and-a-winkyface.Īs time has worn on, I’ve learned to accept my mutt-like status. ![]() The way my neutral Nebraskan accent mixed with the way I pronounced my Minnes ohta “o’s” and the over-enunciation I never outgrew from my childhood (it was always “curtain” not “curt’n”) took on a bit of a southern twang until finally one day, in my hurry to clear a table so I could seat the next guests, a y’all slipped out of my mouth, and I knew The South was beginning to take a hold. My ignorance of all things southern quickly earned me the nickname Doodle - as in Yankee - and the more I absorbed the culture around me, the more I turned into a dialectual mutt of sorts. The thing, though, is that my lack of knowledge made Georgia exciting. I landed a job waitressing at Texas Roadhouse where I learned to say things like, “I’m fixin’ to go home” instead of, “I’m going home,” where the birthday song was, “Fried chicken, country hog, it’s your birthday - YEEHAW!” and where, the first time a customer ordered sweet tea (which was about 5.7 seconds into my first shift), I said, “You mean an iced tea?” To which the customer promptly replied, “You ain’t from around here, are you?” I knew virtually nothing about Georgia before I moved there, gathering what little intel I could from Ray Charles lyrics and faint memories of what I learned about the Civil War from high school history classes. (The first time I saw him in his battle dress uniform, I knew I’d made the right decision.) ![]() Less than a year later, when I was twenty-one, I was moving across state lines to live with him in Georgia, where he was stationed with the Air Force. When I was twenty-years-old, I met a boy.
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