Southern Hospitality

reposted from here.

If you don’t believe in ghosts, you’ve never been to a family reunion.
-Ashleigh Brilliant

We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.
-Shirley Abbott

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.
-George Bernard Shaw

There’s nothing quite like spending time with a true Southern family to make you understand why, “Lord have mercy!” is so much a part of our vocabulary. Southern families are at once loving and caring and diabolical. One of the things we never do is let the dead rest in peace. We drag up history, both happy and murderous, and relive it with all its original clarity. We talk as much about the dead and gone as we do about the living and breathing. Maybe families from other places do the same thing, but I doubt they do it as colorfully as we do.

I had some great-aunts who were school teachers back in the days of one-room schools. As college educated women in a small mountain town, they were a bit out of reach for most mountain men. They never married and so, never had children of their own, but they emotionally adopted one of their nieces, Ruth, who lived with them much of her childhood. When I came into the family in the late 1940’s, I heard stories about Ruth, how smart she was, how beautiful. All her clothes were hanging in an upstairs closet, all her shoes were there. It was only as an adult that I learned that Ruth had been dead for decades, run down by a drunk driver at sixteen while walking home from school---in 1929. Lord have mercy!

Many of us try to distance ourselves from our families. We do everything in our power to not be ‘like’ our families, but it is a futile endeavor. We may change our location, our orientation, our vocabulary, our look, our interests, but the very same blood is coursing through our veins and the very same DNA is cranking away inside our cells. We have a shared history and a shared heritage. We are one with our families and embracing that is an important step in growing up. Every time I look in the mirror, my mother’s face is staring back at me. Every time I curse, my daddy’s voice issues from my mouth. I think like them, I live like them, and I work and play like they did. The thoughts and words may be different, but it is only semantics.

The time at the beach with another Southern family was delightful. I learned about the primacy of the Nashoba County Fair to native Mississippians, and about stringing bullet lights. I got to observe the modern Southern male in his natural habitat, with a fishing pole in one hand and a cell phone in the other. I got to gossip about nearly everybody in Mississippi and decide how they should do their lives differently. Lord have mercy, y’all! It was fun.

Keeping the faith,
Jane