It is seldom I hear about things in the south that are better than areas in the north when it comes to infrastructure.
Of course, we have the best food, music, and festivals, but recently I was told by a lady from Michigan who now lives in Missouri that nowhere else in her travels has she found the Welcome Centers we have in the southern states. Elsewhere, they are sparse and spread out in the middle of the country if they do exist, but they are not as "welcoming" as the ones you pass as you travel deeper and deeper into the south, crossing state lines.
This took me by surprise for a moment, but I soon realized this was nothing all that new. Throughout my travels across the country and abroad I have not come across what we southern folks think of as down-home hospitality. "Kick your feet up and stay a while."
I am not sure culturally how this came to be such a staple in our "neck of the woods." But, it is almost like letting your past grandparents down if you do not extend the same warm welcome you grew up watching them extend at holidays or family reunions.
So, to think that it is an understanding we will have a nice clean rest area to stop in once we get to the next state is refreshing. Now, by today's standards it is not spit and polished, but it is clean and reassuring to know that there will be a stop when you cross the next line.
Southern hospitality is something deeply missed when I travel. It is missed to the point that I often make a fool out of myself establishing eye contact and speaking to strangers when sitting down at a restaurant or getting into an elevator. It feels rude not to.
When did this happen? When did our local culture encompass making strangers feel at home? Was it at the very birth of our nation when the southern states remained rural farming communities due to the rich fertile soil of the past flooding of rivers and streams? Was it that necessity farmers had to depend on one another to make ends meet be it the barter system, or simply swapping out labor to build barns and sew quilts?
Was it the melting pot of people who made their way down those rivers, gulf shores, or wooded trails? A melting pot of the French, Spanish, Germain, Italians and more. People from countries in far away places who left what they new to tread forward into a humid lush land that promised hope for a new beginning. The culmination of cultures cooking down into each family's different version of a gumbo.
Was it the lack of pretention found in the south, even the most austere of cliques? A group of people who may live in an old planation home or a fancy new farm house still making garden homegrown tomato sandwiches and homemade biscuits and gravy.
We talk a little slower taking time to find extra syllables. We walk a little slower and laze about on a breezy afternoon under the shade of an oak like the one I am writing beneath now. We dip our bread in our soup and crumble crackers in our chili. We laugh loud and share fish tales and stories of a second cousins wife's mother. We don't seem to take ourselves too seriously or "put on airs."
Whatever it was in those past generations of the evolving south, it melted into our beings like warm butter on fresh bread. And it became a part of who we are as people from the south. We only have to open our mouths and speak for the rest of the world to know where we are from, but when we then offer an extra chair and a friendly story about how we "came about" a recipe the "welcome" is welcomed and goes without saying.
