Mason Dixon meets a Yankee

So, I'm attempting to enter into a blogging/essay contest hosted by Real Simple on the subject of "Who Am I Most Surprised to Be Friends With?" This is my original essay, which I then had to pare down to 300 words for the contest. I had 178 extra words. Argh. Editing oneself is always difficult because we hold our own words so dear, which is something my journalism professor used to remind us of in class. Turns out, she was right. Who knew I would have trouble editing out the word "unmistakably" simply because I had written it. Anyhoo, here's my entry:


I grew up with a very imposing portrait of General Robert E. Lee gracing the wall of our family home. The General was something like a great-great-great uncle whom I had never met but knew a whole lot about. Our family's annual vacations almost always included some variation of a Civil War memorial/battlefield/museum. And, now, even as a slightly more cosmopolitan adult, I still vaguely believe that a southerner is able to feel the impact of crossing the Mason-Dixon line much like the family dog crossing the electric fence's boundary at the edge of the yard.

When I was barely nineteen, I watched the tall pine trees of my home state of Georgia disappear as the plane I had boarded slipped into the horizon, headed for Colorado and the camp I would be staffing for the next three months.

Soon after arriving in Manitou Springs, a quirky mountain town with a flair for the unusual, I was unpacking my bags in the "penthouse" of the old, un-air-conditioned hotel that housed students and staff. Before long I had been introduced to my roommate for the summer and, lo and behold, she was from Michigan. A real live Yankee. Her accent and mine could scarcely fit in the same small room together.

It didn't take long for me to realize that ours was to be a somewhat uncomfortable roommate situation. There was an icy tension in our 100 degree room at the top of the hotel. Eventually, I was traded like an unpopular baseball player and found myself a few floors down with another roommate, also from Michigan, but with a bit more love for those of us who said "y'all" and "fixin' to" with frequency.

Within a week or two, the most unlikely thing happened. My former roommate and I found ourselves working the same kitchen shift and couldn't keep ourselves from having a really good time. Before long, we were attached at the hip and the old tension that had pushed us apart seemed to have melted away like so much peach ice cream at a Sunday school picnic.

Our unspoken reconciliation did find us confessing to one another at some point that summer how at first, she had unfairly assumed I was a "redneck" and I had just as unfairly assumed she was a "rude yankee." We laughed at our foolishness and spent the rest of that summer with arms linked. We parted ways in September with tears, she to her cold northern state and I to my warm southern one.

Coming back to the South after having been gone for a while is much like being the returning prodigal son. This time, however, I had glimpsed a life outside the humid, peach-scented world I'd grown up in and it didn't take much to carry me back to Colorado two years later for another summer of camp.

Nature VS. Me

Nature and I are in a fight. I haven't admitted this situation to anyone until this moment, but it needs to be said out loud and so I'm saying it. I'm more than a little hesitant to acknowledge the present rift in my relationship with the natural world, but there's currently a spider in my bathroom and no else is here to kill it and it's only the twentieth insect/arachnid I've spied in my house in the last two days, so I'm a little on edge and nature is to blame. There, I said it.

Cicadas have descended on our house this summer like a plague of Moses-era proportions and I'm starting to wonder when they're planning to take over the world and eat all of our belongings. (In related news, I keep reading that Nashvillians are eating them as pizza toppings and dunking them in chocolate. This makes my skin crawl and gives me bad dreams at night.) And yet, those red-eyed, winged monsters are small potatoes compared to the freakishly large wolf spiders Matt so cavalierly dismisses when I point one out and subsequently run away shrieking as he shakes his head and maybe even rolls his eyes a little. He doesn't understand this response of mine to eight-legged creatures, but it's as instinctive a reaction as a knee jerk at the doctor's office. However, he has yet to see it as normal or acceptable.

Speaking of my nature-loving husband, I should tell you that he's overly fond of sleeping on the ground and tasting leaves of edible trees and buying three-day underwear (really?) at the local outdoor store. Before we fell in love, I unwittingly caused him to assume that I, too, was of the sort who loves subzero sleeping bags and climbing things in my spare time and would choose a hike through the woods over a trip to the mall 500 times to zero. And, I'll admit that I do have a soft place in my heart for a good hike through the woods that ends with a nice view on a crisp fall day full of pretty leaves and no mosquitos. BUT, let it be known that although I can strap on a pair of Chacos with the best of them, I love air conditioning and the smell of Starbucks in my hair and the feel of legs that have been shaved within the last 24 hours. So sue me.

But, I'm getting off track. These little differences between my husband and I regarding our hobbies and interests doesn't really have anything to do with the fact that nature and I are in a fight.

I am the proud parent of an 18 month old son who loves dirt under his fingernails and the taste of sand and the feel of bugs and rocks and anything else that has to do with what's outside my air-conditioned house, I am under contract as a mother to a son to be outside more than I would choose to be under normal circumstances. I've noticed of late that I've become increasingly and inconveniently nervous about spending time in the Great Outdoors (i.e. my yard). I find myself scanning our little grassy space for possible lurking reptiles or hairy spiders or kamikaze cicadas. It's nervewracking and I realize that confessing this to you will likely relegate me to the "Lame" category in your slam book. I know that loving nature is cool and relevant and fashionable and "in." And, yet, with each spider in my bathroom and every empty cicada shell on my front stoop, I dream of fumigating this little quarter of an acre we live on.

Perhaps I'm exaggerating here. A little. A very little bit. I fear I am becoming less appealing as a human being as I type this post and so I should wrap this up before I fall off the edge of your list of people you want to hang out with. To sum up, yes, I love God's creation. But, I could really do with a few less cicadas and I'm also considering commissioning a task force to kill all the spiders within a 5 mile vicinity of my house. Is that so wrong?

Don't tell Matt I said that.

An entire post about the weather.

It's HOT. I keep saying this to my husband and to friends on the phone and to cashiers at the grocery store. I'm tired of hearing myself say it, but I can't seem to stop. This is my first summer with a babe (Sam, 6 months and 1 week) and it turns out that carrying an extra (almost) 16 pounds on my hip just makes me hotter. Sadly, only in a temperature-related way, not in a Paris Hilton sort of way.

Currently, it's about 95 degrees here and I'm hanging out in a 70 degree house eating the occasional popsicle and standing over the occasional air vent. I should be used to this heat. I was born and raised in Georgia (read: HOTlanta) for crying out loud. But, alas, I'm a big wimp when it comes to anything above 85 degrees. I should probably be required to turn in my Southern Belle card.

On a semi-related note, while driving home this afternoon from meeting a friend for lunch at my favorite place in Knoxville, (The French Market on Gay St.) I pulled up behind what seemed at first to be a nice little white convertible. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a Ford Focus whose owner had somewhat awkwardly cut the top off of his car. At first I was appalled at the lack of foresight (What will he do when it rains? What about when it turns cold again, if that ever happens?) but that was mixed with something like admiration. Perhaps this driver of the altered Ford Focus was on to something. Perhaps my Jeep Grand Cherokee could also go through a similar transformation and allow Sam and I to feel the wind in our hair as we drove down the hot interstate. I took another look at the Ford Focus "convertible" and decided that, in fact, I should not make that man my role model. Still, when you're living in 95 degrees (100 degree heat index) you find that things like cutting the top off of your sedan sound like a good idea. Evidence, perhaps, that extreme heat kills brain cells

The babe is stirring. Time for one of those aforementioned diaper changes.