country girl/citified...

It recently occurred to me that this person who rarely thinks of herself as an adult/grown-up has lived here in middle Georgia longer than anyplace else. So though I will tell people I am the 'country girl' who grew up running loose in the woods of south Georgia, and learned how to drive on dirt roads, it appears that I have accidently become 'citified' without realizing it occurred.

When I moved to middle Georgia in 1981, it was a fearful process. I told people for the longest time that I had wondered if folks I encountered 'up here' in the north would sound funny, talk with an unfamiliar accent? When I reality I would be the one that they would be laughing at, coming away from my insulated little rural environment, with my syrupy southern drawl. I am occasionally surprised to realize that I have been in one place for so long: longer than the total of my growing up years in a small community in the deep south. 

I know it's not all bad: my dad taught my daughters to drive along those same dirt roads where  he taught me. In between the ditches, looking out over miles of cotton and corn. Some sandy, some slick hard red clay, some so 'wash-board' like after a rain, you'd think your teeth were coming loose if you drove too fast - more effective than any asphalt speed bump! You won't see big yellow road-graders trundling down streets in the city, going to smooth out the washed out places after a heavy rain, miles away from the nearest 'hard road'. Or have schools called off because the roads were completely washed out when remnants of a hurricane blew through, with bridges left high and dry, approaches swept into the Gulf of Mexico, so buses cannot get into remote areas to pick up students.

My dad, the cotton ginner, even taught me how to drive a fork lift. He used it to move 500 pound bales of cotton around in his warehouses, and amazingly, he apparently thought that was something I needed to know.  I might as well go ahead and confess, that after I drove it down the ramp, and got marooned in the soft sand at the bottom, that was the end of my fork-lift driving career. I can't even begin to guess how much those things must weigh, to counterbalance a five-hundred plus bale of cotton. I do know he must have been highly annoyed at my foolishness, plus having to extract his equipment that was stuck. But I[m still here, telling the story, so he obviously did not strangle me.