Southern Loving

My heart sings "home" today. My tires are hungry for open highways; they can't wait to be West bound-devouring the hills of Arkansas, attempting to reach"Native America" before the sun goes down. My soul pines to roam the places I know; past Muskogee County and Tiger Mountain Road.

I am sure that most people do not understand the ache and the hunger that the South creates. There is a sweetness and a hospitality there that Northerners would have to first, taste, to believe.

The deeper I go-the more it becomes a part of me; there is something about the South that is life changing and captivating.

I find it the most in my Nan's Southern cooking...mashed potatoes and giblet gravy, pineapple pie and tamale stuffing. It is rich, thick and dripping from the southern drawl of my Uncle Gene and his"big fish" stories. I taste it in the sipping of my Aunt Norma's steaming hot gingerbread tea and breathe it in while I watch the sun sink bellow the flat, dry, earth of the colorful Lubbock skyline.

It is the South.

It is the smell of leather, and Ariat boots. It is sweet tea and porch swings. It is love that expounds the universe-that should be carved into trees and written in storybooks. It is pancakes and biscuits and gravy, it is hash-brown casserole and black coffee, it is ten gallon hats and old saloons, and dusty roads. It is the freedom of chasing stars on empty highways just to feel alive. It is loving every time, like it is the first and last time.

It is flannel, and shelling peas, and Indian jewelry. It is Oklahoma-and the dusty red dirt, that cakes up in your shoes and is impossible to get out of your carpet. It is Cherokee Nation-and floating the river. It is looking for crawdads in the creek below The Town Branch, it is the secrets hidden in the trees of the Northern hills, that will never be told. It is the miles and miles of bare-naked, Texan earth that kisses the night stars as it spreads itself out against the horizon line without interruption .

It is God and He is everywhere; wrapped up in the beautiful crystal waters of Turner Falls and blossoming in the sandy colored rose-rocks that the mountains make.

It is humbling, it is endearing, it is a wool blanket on cold nights next to campfires. It is camping in the woods near Eufaula lake. It is everything.

I am convinced of two things. One is that in the soul of every person, there is a vacancy and an aching hunger that only the South can satiate;

the other is:

after the South loves you once-

You'll never go hungry again.