I was born in Georgia, I grew up in Texas, and my parents are retiring to Virginia. My aunt still lives in Georgia and my grandparents retired in Alabama. If that southern hole isn’t deep enough for you, I don’t know what is.
My parents met at Emory Law School, and then my New Englander mother married a good ol' southern boy from Georgia. In my house, FOX News is the only news, and my dad wipes his ass with the New York Times.
Fall in the south is summer in the north, and the leaves only turn brown when the summer heat grows too hot. And that burnt-leaves color is a similar color to most of my Nana’s cooked vegetables after they’ve stewed for five hours.
Almost everyone in my neighborhood has a pool, but its 95-degree temperature is only refreshing to my dogs after a long morning outside.
My mom has a saying that in the summer it’s “80s by 8:00 and 90s by 9:00.” One summer we went three months without a drop of rain, and another we went 20 days without dropping below 100 degrees.
Texas is the greatest country in the United States, and there is no reason to leave it.
That is the ideology that surrounded me for most of my childhood. There is a cycle in Texas: grow up in a suburb, go to UT or A&M and meet your husband, get married, have kids, and move back to the same suburb. Your husband will work in oil and you will be a teacher. On the weekends, you will juggle Texas High School Football, College Gameday, and the Cowboys.
I know it because I lived and witnessed it. My town’s high school is seventh in the country and everyone knows it. We fill up Cowboy Stadium each year not to watch the NFL but rather to cheer on the Tigers at the Texas High School Football Championships.
Going to the movies in the south sucks. You can never see over the lady’s hair in front of you. At least she’s closer to Jesus.
It is unheard-of to be Jewish in the south. I graduated with 967 kids, only two of whom celebrated Hanukkah. My high school parking spot said “The Jew.” My brother’s said, “The Jew 2.”
Since moving to Boston I have not had good barbecue. It’s always too dry, or too fatty. My mom and brother once were driving on Highway 71 in Texas and saw a burger joint that offered the “freshest burger in town.” There was a trailer of cows parked in front of the restaurant.
My mom swore that she would never be like the other southern mothers. Most southern mothers demand that their kids stay close to home for college so that they can protect them. My mom didn’t, so I went to Boston. Still, she often asks, “Do you want me to come up there?” Mom, I live 1,800 miles away.
The first time my dad met my boyfriend, they didn't really meet, but rather sat in a painful silence. My dad sat directly across the table from him, and while the rest of my family caught up on the past few months, his eyes bore a hole through Andy’s soul.
Everyone and their mother (literally) is in your business, Texans holler “SECEDE” daily, and it’s a requirement for each house to display a cross and a deer head. That’s just the way it is. You decide whether it is a good life, but it is the only life I’ve known and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
