I yearn for a string of lazy afternoons lolly gagging on the front porch of Uncle Ed’s and Aunt Ceni’s farmhouse near Ramer, Tennessee while swinging with a glass of sweet tea in my hand, with nothing to do but watch the butterflies light on one of her flowers, while breathing in the humid earthy air. Swinging was only interrupted to toss horseshoes or play Chinese checkers or listen to Uncle Ed as he played the harmonica and me playing the juice harp or me and my friends playing mumbley peg, coquet, or tossing horseshoes out in the yard. Oh! how I need to hear the sound of a late-summer rain on their tin roof, and the sweet chorus of crickets and bullfrogs at sunset and to feel the cocooning wrap of their feather bed at night time.

The fascination with the South is a nostalgia for a place that isn’t as busy or as caught up in the latest gimmicks or fad nor caught up with stress of business affairs in the concrete and asphalt jungles of city life. The feeling of belonging doesn’t exist anywhere bigger and better than in the South. In no other place in this country are family, heritage, religion, food, race, and hunting more entwined. These are what has shaped our region, along with being the only region to have been defeated in war and therefore to feel somehow inferior to other parts of the country.