Beech Tree News Network

The South is changing -  well DUH!

Five middle aged women sat beside a hospital bed waiting for one of them to go into surgery. The fact they were there seemed to be the only indication they were interested in the main subject - the one in bed.

One said, “Do y'all remember that girl that married the Richardson boy?”

“Wasn't that Emmy Lou Smith?”

“No, Emmy Lou Smith married at Jim McClellan. I'm talking about that girl with a crooked leg. She married that Richardson boy from the holler.”

“No she didn't. I know who you're talking about. She married Odel Blocker and they had that boy that had to go to the penitentiary.”

They talked on is if the whole mixed-up affair needed to be settled before the stick woman went into the operating room -- who by-the-way was a sister to two of the talkers, and double first cousin to the other two.

I grew up in the South of this nature, where the hospital was more or less a social get-together. Where folks almost never spoke of events outside their own community.

An example of this : There is a story about a boy and his uncle Rube in a boat fishing a “long hole of water in Irons Creek.”

“A beaver was slapping the water at the lower end of the hole”,  the boy relates. “We had caught a few Bass and Brim. We looked up and saw Afton Ratliff walking towards us across the field. He stopped and shouted to Uncle Rube across the water;

“Who's your man for President?”

“Wallace!” (George Wallace)

“They just shot him!”

“Afton Ratliff headed back towards his house. We went on fishing.”

Today is not the South I grew up in. That one is all but gone - except for a few of us oldies who still have a few marbles bumping together upstairs. Most of our friends are gone.

Someone described the NOW South as one changed forever by “television, interstate highways, throwaway Plastics and double knit preachers from California.” I’d need to add computers to that.

Thomas Jefferson once said of Southerners ; “They are fiery, Independent, zealous for their own liberties, generous and candid.” Jefferson went on to say “An observing traveler without a map may always know his location by the character of the people among whom he finds himself.” Southerners that is.

One of the aspects of Southerners (there are many) Jefferson could have mentioned; we take longer to say hello. We stay longer after we said it. Then we take longer to say our goodbyes.

Someone said the reason people want to go to Florida is the same reason they went want to go to Heaven.  The climate is great and that's where all their friends are.

Kindest regards...