wrapping it up

Being a proud Southerner through and through, I took Southern Living’s online quiz, “How Southern Are You?”

Not surprisingly, I am “eat up with it.”

I feel blessed to have grown up with these experiences (and more) that define our region:

• double names
• fireflies in Mason jars
• saying bless your heart
• monogrammed stationery
• tailgating in the Grove
• calling my mother mama
• crawfish boils
• shelling peas on the porch
• seersucker
• camo
• scheduling weddings around football season
• knowing Shelby’s “blush” and “bashful” colors in Steel Magnolias

We were introduced to some of the things that I checked off by our children, so the tradition continues.

Talking with each other and telling tales are other Southern traditions. I wish I were a better oral storyteller, but I am so thankful to have the opportunity to use some of those gifts as I write. Sometimes I feel like the words that people share can wrap themselves around you and make you feel understood, and noticed, and loved. A gift indeed.

And I know the real color and warmth in us, as a people, is not in the landscape or the sky but in our language, the way we lean the words against each other. We are the best-spoken people on earth, not in the realm of grammar, perhaps, but in the pictures we paint and hang on the air. Rick Bragg

The March Slice of Life Challenge has been invigorating and exhausting, encouraging and frustrating. But most of all it has given me the opportunity to follow my dream and answer my calling. To write.

Thank you Two Writing Teachers for this wonderful opportunity. Thank you, commenters, for taking time to stop by and share a friendly touch with your words. It has been a fast ride this year. And a good one, too.

I hope we’ll all see each other again on Tuesdays when the weekly Slice of Life Challenge continues. Wow – that’s tomorrow. No rest for the weary, as my mother used to say…