Reading some of TPQ’s posts has made me think about my own experience of being southern. I haven’t really thought about these issues in a while. I don’t have a lot of contact with my family of origin anymore. I haven’t thought about those issues in a while either. It’s not that my family doesn’t want me…they call and stuff, they invite me and my partner to do things. I just don’t know how to be around them anymore. I’m so unsure of my place with them. I can honestly say that i think they have tried to make me feel accepted and i think the distance between us would not be as big if i didn’t let it be.
Where i grew up is very small and we lived on land my father’s family had owned for a while. I now call it a family compound. It is a mountain slope where my father grew up and then built his own house on. Various other family members and ramshackle buildings including outhouses and trailers and a barn and storehouses also inhabited the same hillside. We planted gardens and canned food and some of my older relatives wore mostly homemade clothes. But most of our food came from a grocery store like the closest, piggly-wiggly, and sometimes we even got to eat mcdonald’s when we were in “town”. And all of us kids had store bought clothes (even if they were hand-me-downs by the time i got them), and me and my brother had saved and bought a Nintendo, and we had satellite tv for a memorable point in time. It was a mix of two different ways of living.
