A little ode to the South

Sometimes I miss the South so much.

The wonderfully drawn-out chats at cash registers and in elevators. The non-rhetorical “How are you doings” that yield curve-ball insights. The obligation to connect eyes and share a smile with the stranger crossing your…

Good Country People

If there is one thing Northerners think they understand, it’s the South. The temptation, at least as old as Aesop’s “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,” is understandable: there is a certain delight in the superiority complex that comes with cosmopolitanism. After my family moved to rural…

Old Lives In the New South

Walker Percy wrote shortly before his death in 1990, “It takes some doing to insert oneself in such a way as to not succumb to the ghosts of the Old South or the happy hustlers of the new Sunbelt South.” Twenty-six years later, the ghosts of the Old South are still stirring. Nine…