S is for My Glorious Southland

I was born in the Deep South and lived there until I was sixty-three, when we moved to New Mexico to be near our daughter, Wendy, and her family. I was born in Shreveport, LA, but I don’t remember living there. Here are the places that I have lived after Shreveport:

·     Baton Rouge, LA – I remember nothing about this city because I was just a baby.

·     Mobile, AL – We moved there when I was two, and I have a few definite memories.

·     New Orleans, LA – When I was five, we moved to The Crescent City. I attended all of my elementary school years there and one year of junior high school.

·     Pensacola, FL – I was thirteen in May 1953, and we moved to Pensacola in August of that year. I completed my junior high and all of my high school years there. I consider Pensacola my hometown!

·     Clinton, MS – I spent all of my college years at Mississippi College (B.A. and M.A. degrees) and married Frank while we were both still students. Wendy was born in Jackson, MS, during our college days.

·     Pascagoula, MS – I began my teaching career at Pascagoula High School in 1964, and taught at Live Oak School and Jackson County Junior College during our years in Pascagoula. Jay was born while we lived there.

·     Pensacola, FL – We left Pascagoula in 1969, and moved to my hometown so that Frank could learn my parents’ business since it would be ours someday. I taught at Woodham High School for almost 28 years.

·     Cerrillos, NM – In 2003, we moved to The Land of Enchantment, the first place not in the Deep South, and here we are today in 2018. We’ll never live anyplace else!

For sixty-three of my seventy-eight years, I never thought much about living in the Deep South. Where else would I live? It never entered my mind that I’d transplant all the way across the country, but I did. When people from other parts of the country said that they didn’t know how I could stand living in all that humidity, I’d shrug my shoulders and say, “What humidity?” I thought everyone dripped in the summer. But the first time I went back to Pensacola after moving to New Mexico, I almost died when I walked out of the airport into the beautiful sunshine and very wet air that I had lived in most of my life and never even noticed it. I loved living in the Deep South and cried buckets before we left my hometown to move to Cerrillos, NM, even though I wanted to move.

I could write a book about why I love living in the Southwest, but that’s not the topic for this piece. Instead, I’ll just say that even though I have a gazillion friends here and even though I love our not-so-new house (it’s fifteen years old now) and even though having four distinct seasons is delightful, I still long for My Glorious Southland and must go back at least once a year.  I couldn’t stand it if I couldn’t see my old friends and my cousin JoAnn and Frank’s brother Bob at least once a year. And maybe even more importantly, I couldn’t bear to go more than a year without delicious fried seafood . . . not seafood at Red Lobster, the only kind we can get here in NM. I keep up with my friends regularly through email, Facebook, and occasional phone calls, but REAL fried seafood here in NM is almost nonexistent!

When I lived in the Deep South, I didn’t realize how gloriously beautiful it is. I love our scenery here in the high desert, but nothing can compare to the lush green of Northwest Florida. In fact, that lushness begins in East Texas and continues through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama before I reach the Panhandle of Florida.

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And finally, there are no people like my people in the South. Please don’t have your feelings hurt if you live elsewhere. I have met wonderful people all over the world, but there’s just something about Southerners that draws me to them. We have similar accents and use the same figures of speech. For the most part, we go to church on Sunday morning and we have conservative political leanings. I just fit in with Southerners.  I wrote a piece recently called “You Can Take the Girl Out of the South, but You Can’t Take the South Out of the Girl.” It’s true! I love My Glorious Southland . . . but I just want to visit. I’m a New Mexican with a Southern heart and will always live right here in the hills outside Cerrillos, NM!