on Loving Georgia

As an expatriated Yankee, I’m often asked why I love Georgia so much. During my recent Memorial Day travels, I was reminded why.

It’s driving down back country roads, the bass from my speakers flowing from my car interrupting the peace of the country. “It’s that city noise,” I imagine the cows cursing at me underneath their breath.

It’s how naked porches look without the presence of a rocking chair. The fact that there’s the indoor broom, but then the one over there, worn and aged after a diligent life spent indoors, is now solely responsible for all outdoor spaces. It's a lifestyle of leisure. One that allows you to sit on your porch, watching cars pass by, speaking to people who, simply because they live in your neighborhood, automatically lose the title of ‘stranger’.

On the back roads in towns like Midville with fewer than 500 people and a mere 2 square miles, you can still find gas stations with pumps circa 1960s, trusting you not to prepay. Because as a resident, self-described as being just about everything in town– police chief, county commissioner, etc– explained as he assisted me, the city girl, “We figure down here, that we can catch up to you before you get to where you’re going.”

It’s when I step into the gas station to use the bathroom, and I come out with an aroma of fried chicken or barbeque smoke trailing behind me, because the gas station is also a popular restaurant.

Or when you see people walking along back roads, and you start wondering where they’re going because you don’t see anything in sight.

I may be an urbanite by upbringing, but I’m a small-town girl in spirit. And in the South, small towns never mean only few black people as they do in the North– a product of the end the Civil War, as newly freed slaves either claimed their old plantations as home or scattered a few miles away before establishing all black communities.

It’s the one-room churches, appearing mile after mile, Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal, Jehovah’s Witnesses. . . with Euphrates, Jordan, and Zion in their titles.

Or the abandoned, dilapidated, southern mansions, whose histories are rooted as deeply as the age-old trees that shade them. It’s how making up stories is a must when driving Southern back roads. The ones that make you wince: whose spirit was broken in that house? Then there are the ones that are comforting: is that house a forgotten stop on the Underground Railroad?

It’s standing squarely with my back to the future and it being impossible to ignore how far the South has come. It’s my grandmother’s pound cake. It’s where my family is from.

And for me, it’s the first and only state that has ever truly felt like home.