Some years back, I moved from a large western city to what, at the time, seemed like a small eastern town of about a million inhabitants. Ah, l'amour. Several years after that, I swapped a career for stay-at-home motherhood and followed l'amour to a place I call Splendaville, a tiny southern hub, where over time I have painfully and laboriously discovered that I am actually a freak who lived in a gloriously ignorant urban bubble that I will likely never inhabit again. After a year of wailing and thumb sucking along with my first born, I decided to try and get along in this strangely homogenous, Lord-loving realm. I joined a mother's group and set about attempting to fit in with all the happy-looking women I saw around me. I joined the local gym, hosted cookie-decorating play dates and visits to pumpkin patches, nodded pleasantly during conversations about Bible study class, and brought hors d'oeuvres to the monthly bunco night. I bent over backwards trying to be that fun yet caring friend you knew you could count on in a pinch, sure that it would give me all the sense of belonging I lacked.
Attempting to fit in eventually proved to be a spectacular failure, resulting in a physical and psychological collapse that I might discuss if I ever sober up. The upshot is that I gave up on fitting in around here and decided to focus on enjoying all that is lovely about The South (deep front porches, gnarled live oaks, fireflies, fluffy lard biscuits, beautiful seasons, charming architecture, summer storms, hush puppies, old-fashioned drawls, Southern Magnolias, affordable homes, nice manners, genteel pace of life, and glorious pork barbeque, just to name a few), and ridiculing the rest in a random and gratifying internal monologue that I recently decided to put down here for my personal amusement.
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