Musings Of A New Southern Man

The temperature today was 93 and the humidity was about 70 percent at midmorning. It's the kind of day they warn you about when you move to the South. Just bear up under the conditions, veteran Southerners told me. I bear up nicely, at least on my best days. What makes this return to the Southern sweatbox is that we had three days of absolutely beautiful weather before this latest blast hit. I mean, it was chamber of commerce weather. Temperatures were in the low 80s, nighttime lows went to the low 60s, and the humidity was less than 50 percent. That's as good as it gets in August. We have an attic fan that goes unused during a large part of the summer because the humidity is so taxing. That attic fan was on in the morning for those three glorious days. Cool air swept through open doors and windows. We basked in the beauty of the day. I know my old Colorado friends would be running for their dehumidifiers if the humidity hit 45 percent, but this weather and Colorado's hav...

There is nothing particularly Southern in this post, although Southerners are as boxed in by this concept as folks from Up North or Out West. It regulates our existences. It marks where we are, have been, and will be. It might even determine who we are if we allow it that much power. Time. Deb and I have a calendar on a shelf in our great room. It has metal rectangles for every day, date, and month. We follow the passage of time in 24-hour increments. There is a minor ritual, usually in the early morning as one of us interrupts our coffee drinking, in which the proper metal rectangles are put in place. What happens when you do that daily ritual? The rush of time becomes apparent. The recent transition to August replaces the one for July, which takes the place of June, which seems as if it was only yesterday. 2018 becomes the latest little box in which we exist, just as 2017 is, and 1992, 1976, and so on. Time is no longer a tame friend but a relentless orderer of things, even a t...

I'd heard about this Southern hospitality long before I moved here. I pictured folks with wide smiles and thick drawls wishing me a nice day. (To get the proper drawl, hold on to the vowel for a lot longer, so it's niiiiiice day.) It didn't take long to find out being helpful isn't a chamber of commerce rumor. My wife went to Chick-fil-A to get midday meals for all the movers hauling items for us when we arrived in South Carolina. That entailed handling a couple of large bags and a few large soft drinks. It was a difficult load to carry. She wasn't left to bear that burden alone. A teenager employed by the fast food palace stepped up and asked whether she needed help. He then carried much of the load, and finished with a nice "thank you" before hustling back inside. That isn't an isolated incident. My son posted a photo on Facebook recently that showed a Chick-fil-A employee with his head under the hood to help a patron who couldn't get his car s...

I knew it was coming because the weather radar showed big areas of red and yellow nearby. That meant heavy rain (and possibly heavier rain) along with thunder and lightning. I walked out to our screen porch and pulled up a rocking chair so I could witness the show. It was tame when I arrived. The only sign of pending trouble was a darkening sky as thick clouds gathered. The actual storm started gently with a slight breeze that ruffled leaves on the stand of tall trees behind our home. I could imagine that breeze swaying palm trees on a tropical beach rather than sweet gums and poplars. That breeze turned into a solid wind. The bigger trees nearer our home simply had the upper branches moved, but the spindly young trees at the back of the lot started moving back and forth like a collection of drinking straws swaying to the music. The dark clouds huddled closer. The wind changed identity and became a small gale. The young trees were bending deeper toward the ground with each curren...

The route to get to where we built our new home is Manse Jolly Road. I figured this Jolly fella was a former civic official or rich guy, the kind who usually have roads named after them. Turns out Jolly is one of those figures that reminds me that I am in a Confederate state that was bound and determined to split from those Yankees and form their own nation. Manson Jolly was a young man from Anderson who went off to fight for the South in the Civil War. So did five of his brothers. Manse was a member of the South Carolina cavalry and made it through the war. None of his brothers did. Four died on the battlefield and the fifth by other means. Manse returned to Anderson to find his family decimated by the horrors of war. To make matters worse, those Northerners were occupying his hometown. Times were tough for Southern families who routinely had whatever crops or animals they raised taken by the Union soldiers. Manse didn't take kindly to that and became a trained horse soldier ben...

This wasn't supposed to happen this soon. Yes, my brother Steve had health problems for years. Nothing indicated that he was so close to the time of his passing. There were no messages or warnings. We were caught off-guard. I have spent considerable time weighing the impact. There is so much information and emotional baggage to weigh. I have found few answers, only more questions. I won't detail those here. The only certainty I have reached is this: Steve's death affects me most because he was of my generation, the first family member of the younger set to pass away. That brings the reality of mortality that much closer. I wrote in one of my novels of a man explaining why he made death such a major factor in his writing. (There is nothing autobiographical in this, by the way.) His point was that most death doesn't affect us much. We read or hear about deaths of many people by many means, but those deaths don't hurt us because we don't know.these people. The ...

Goodbye literary angle. Hello commentaries on daily life. Welcome to this son of eastern Oregon becoming a transplanted son of the Deep South, with intervening times in northern California wine country and the Front Range of Colorado. It's not as tough a transition as one might believe. I was getting a haircut a few weeks ago in my new hometown of Anderson, South Carolina, and I was wearing a T-shirt with a big yellow O on it. A young man in the chair as I waited my turn said, "Oh, you must be a fan of the Oregon Ducks." I hurried My  to correct him. "No, I am a Duck, an official graduate of the University of Oregon." He smiled and continued the conversation. "Being here must be a culture shock, this being the South and all." I had to correct him again. "I was raised in eastern Oregon, in an area where many people work in cherry orchards or on wheat ranches. It's not the Portlandia view of the state. People tend to be conservative, and they ...