Southern Me

I don't make a big deal of this, or even think about it very often, but I am from the South.

Not the Deep South. Not the land of lynchings and continued confederate fantasies. But I was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, in a town I don't remember and have never visited. And I did go to high school in Virginia--Northern Virginia--which is not really Virginia, as anyone who is really from Virginia can tell you. But it is below the Mason-Dixon Line. And my High School history class was called: Virginia and U.S. History. Note the order. Virginia thinks it is a big deal. And I was brainwashed like a true Virginian. A.P. History style.

So mostly this part of me is dead. Forgotten. It lays inside me and does not stir.

But then, suddenly, it does.

Like, when I hear a Van Morrison song, I feel like weeping, picking up a banjo, and hopping on the Appalachian trail and hiking down to North Carolina. When I hear a man smart man speak with a Southern drawl--my heart just melts. Just keep talking. That is all I want to say.

I like Madras. I like the Blue Ridge Mountains. I like Charlottesville. I like Nag's Head. I like the Chesapeake Bay and I like Old Bay Seasoning. And soft-shell crabs pulled out of the Chesapeake in June. And though my parents are back in New England where they belong, some part of me still belongs to the south. To my Maryland grandmother, to oysters, to Thomas Jefferson, the Potomac River and dogwoods in springtime. You won't hear me speak of it again. But it is there, inside me, in suspended animation.

Do you have a place like that inside you? A place you deny to the point you forget it exists, but every once in awhile it pokes its head through and shocks you?

Tell me, dear reader: What is it?