I love the sleepy little towns that decorate the landscape of the American south with water towers and church steeples, cotton fields and John Deere tractors. Some of them are so small that they are hard to find on a map. Big cities might connect us to the world, but we who choose to reside in these small southern communities have never forgotten how important it is to connect with each other. We are the south's heart and soul.
We are the casserole bearing ladies at the Garden Club, the old men chewing tobacco and swapping lies outside the general store, and Poke Salad and Fire Ant Festivals. We are grits and red-eye gravy and lightnin' bugs dancing through magnolia trees on a sultry summer night. We sit on our front porches in the cool of the evening, and we attend all day revival meetings with dinner on the grounds. We sing "Amazing Grace" and amazingly enough, most of us still believe in the words.
We have chickens and clotheslines, watermelon patches and coonhounds and a rope swing that hangs from the ancient oak that overlooks the swimmin' hole.
We still celebrate the Fourth like our grandparents did, with firecrackers and speeches and main street parades, and we stand proudly with our hand over our heart and a lump in our throat when the flag passes by. Our sons and our daughters fought for freedom and democracy in every war this country ever took part in, and we lost some of them on foreign soil, and some of them to the concrete jungles of the big cities.
We love the south, and we love America. If you were to dissect us, you would find that we are red, white and blue to the very core.
We are as red as the wrinkled necks of the farmers who frequent the local feed 'n seed, and as red as the bricks of the schoolhouse that has held over four generations of scholars.
We are white, also, like the chips of paint that are peeling off of beloved turn-of-the-century houses, and white as the feathers of the snowy egrets that roost in the gnarled cypress trees of our bayous.
Blue is our color, too. Blue as the hydrangeas that are planted beneath our bedroom windows, and as blue as the lonely whistle of the freight train that rumbles it's way through the middle of town at midnight, setting all the dogs to howling.
We are content with our slower paced way of life and our congenial "how ya'll doin'?" neighbors. Most of them are known to us on a first-name basis, and we help them raise their kids and they return the favor, because it does, indeed, take a village to bring up a child.
High tech passed us by long ago and few of us even missed it. And if you should wander off the main highway and stop to visit us, we can't offer you much in the way of entertainment. We have little industry, little crime, and just a little bit of antiquity that might be of interest to a tourist. But you will always be welcome and our doors will always be open to you, for in fact, they are seldom locked.
Our grass roots go down deep into the south's past and serve to give us stability and hope in an ever-changing world. There may come a time when we cannot hold onto this innocence which has so far sheltered the Mayberrys of the south; but for now, we cling tenaciously to our small town heritage. And we pray that when change does inevitably come, she will be merciful and deal kindly with the children who are following us, and who will inherit our dreams.
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