Southern Frame of Mind

I could not possibly love a land more than I love the American South.  The South flows in my blood, is imprinted in my genes and beats in my heart.  My ancestors cut their way through Southern forests, lived the story of the South and passed it on to me.  I love Southern people, quirks and all, with their diversity of spirit, common decency and courtesy.  I love the Southern landscape, too.  I like to think from a "Forever Summer" perspective which I think is distinctly Southern.  Which reminds me of one of my favorite descriptions of the Southern landscape from The Mind of the South by W. J. Cash:

"Moreover, there was the influence of the Southern physical world - itself a sort of cosmic conspiracy against reality in favor of romance.  The country is one of extravagant colors, of proliferating foliage and bloom, of flooding yellow sunlight, and, above all perhaps, of haze.  Pale blue fogs hang above the valleys in the morning, the atmosphere smokes faintly at midday, and through the long slow afternoon, cloudstacks tower from the horizon and the earth-heat quivers upward throught the iridescent air, blurring every outline and rendering every object vague and problematical.  I know that winter comes to the land, certainly.  I know that there are days when the color and the haze are stripped away and the real stands up in drab and depressing harshness.  But these things pass and are forgotten." 

I am glad home is a place where old times are remembered, but winter and drabness pass and are forgotten..... 

Comments

[C. Robin Janning]

Jan,

That quotation made me weak in knees! Wow. Thank you for this post. It shakes the dust of reality out of my mind for a while.

Robin

[Jan Neal]

Robin, I have carried Cash's description handwritten on a sheet of paper since college. Now I have the book, but then I did not but was so taken by the description, I wrote it down to carry for life. And I still have that crumpled piece of paper. This description rang true then and now. I am glad you like it.

[Brie Dodson]

Jan, why am I not surprised - you're the only other person I've ever known who's mentioned "The Mind of the South." I, too, read it in college: at William and Mary, in a course called "The American South," where I foolishly thought I would get to spend the entire semester reminiscing on paper about East Texas. ;-)

East Texas is in my blood - always has been, always will be. Some folks consider that part of Texas more Deep South than the Deep South itself. On my last visit back there - a long time ago, now - I kissed the ground on our first stop after the Texas state line. The folks with me probably thought I was being pretentious, but if I could have, I would have stretched out full-length on my belly and just lain there, just me and the dirt. You never stop being a Texan.

What does surprise me is that after only, oh, four decades in and around the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia seems to have imprinted itself on my DNA, too. Seven years ago now, my family parted with a tract of land along the seventh bend of the Shenandoah River. We'd cleared, gardened, built on, rebuilt, lived on, and loved that land, for thirty years. I still miss it. Not having that land to go back to is like a physical pain, like losing an extremity and feeling the phantom limb almost still there.

It's a Southern thing. ;-)