Saturday, February 12, 2011

Why I Love Living in the South

I grew up in Oklahoma but a little over six years ago I moved to Louisiana for love.  My husband, the Georgia boy, had moved here and I was just passing through Texas with my job so we decided to make Louisiana our home.  I grew up watching movies like Steel Magnolias and reading Gone With the Wind so I was tickled pink to be able to live in the south.  As with anything in life, it's never as romantic as the fiction it inspires but I truly love living here.  Here are some of the reasons why I love living in the south.

We monogram anything that will stand still.

We give our girls names like Elizabeth, Mary Frances, Charlotte, Margaret and Caroline.

Our boys have last names as first names such as Bradford, Cooper, Jefferson and Davis.

We make our children say ma'am and sir to anyone over 15 years of age.

We're suckers for anything in toile print...or animal print.  Toile or animal printand monogrammed?  Puh-lease, we'll take it in both colors.

We produce authors who write works like "The Help", "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" and the "Sweet Potato Queen" series.

Gravy has its own food group.

Words like "icebox" and "the show" are still alive and well.

If you don't know what going to the show means, you'll need to find a native Southerner.

We use the phrases "might could" and "might should."  Example: I might should go to the store before this storm comes in.

This one only applies to where I live in the New Orleans area but we get the entire week off for Mardi Gras.  How awesome is that?

More than a half inch of snow is reason enough to cancel school and call in absent to work.

We've managed to make "y'all" an almost universally accepted word.

We torture our daughters with events like cotillion and debuts.

We know that any restaurant worth its salt will have sweet tea on the menu.

Our maiden names become our middle names when we get married thereby ensuring that everyone knows who we are and where we came from.

Tailgating for football games is an artform.

But the biggest reason I love living in the south are the people I've met who call this place home.  I'll never be a native southerner, like they are, but they've opened up their hearts and lives to me and my family and become the village that we need as we live our lives and raise our children away from our own families.  No matter where I go in life I'll always treasure the time I spent living in the south.  

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