Christmas 2011: Living in the Deep South is DIFFER'NT, ya'll

Savannah, GA.

We’ve moved to a foreign country. Trees. Trees. And More Trees. In the West, you can see for miles and miles. For example, you can see the Stratosphere on the Las Vegas Strip from St. George, Utah. Here, you can’t see more than ten feet in any direction. Additionally, the streets aren’t straight, they twist and bend and curve back around on themselves and they change names mid-course. No purple mountain majesties immovably point East. Linus-like I drag a ragged map everywhere I go—even to bed.

They tawk fore-ruhn. One morning we stopped at a fast food restaurant. A muscular black man walked away from the door of the restaurant toward a lone car. I questioned him when it would open. He said, “Potabeenia-yn.” Huh? We were five minutes down the road before I teased: “Supposed to be nine,” out of his single word response. We’ve met a few people that we flat can’t understand.

The cuisine is also foreign. I attended my first ever “fish fry” in our church parking lot. Four large kettles of oil perched on low-sitting burners in the parking lot, each nursed by a church member dropping in breaded fish and spoonfuls of batter to make hush puppies. (They will hush your puppies right up, because they’ll give them cardiac arrest!) I thought fried food went out of style in the 1980’s ... I asked about organic apples at the grocery; the produce manager explained that they don’t carry organic because, “You can’t get these country people to eat that stuff.”

We shop at the “Piggly Wiggly.” (Now, if that name don’t make you laugh ...) We ate boiled, I mean “ba-oiled” peanuts. Alex’s kindergarten concert sang “Jingle Ba-yells” and Santa asked Rudolf to “gaiyde his slei-ay tu-nait.” If you’re proper, then you always respond with “Yes, ma’am” and “Thankyouma’am.” Corey goes crazy when Alex responds to him with, “Yes, sir.”