Land-lovers

"You know we belong to the land... "
Curly ~ Oklahoma!

Where would you hear your dentist say the following to the hygienist:"Well, just let me know if you want to come get some pecans, I'll ride out the tractor and bush hog the grass".
Answer: In Georgia of course!
And is the dentist a part time farmer? Or perhaps a local southern boy who was raised on a farm? No, none of that. He's just a regular guy who loves the land.

Owning land, large farming contraptions such as bush hoggers and tractors, and harvesting some sort of crop is considered perfectly normal around here, even if you're a white-collar worker by trade. My in-laws, for instance, who own their business, and work at it day and night, own about ten ares, a pond, several sheds of fishing equipment, a tractor, a bush hogger, and a field where they can keep horses. Our chaplain, a man who is active duty military, and who only came back from Iraq last summer, has enough pecan trees to supply the entire congregation with a few pounds of pecans each year. And the people living behind us own four-wheelers they use to ride around their land, and make some money on the side selling, you guessed it, pecans.

It's an interesting dichotomy here in the south. On the one hand, many of the local women are almost always dressed up to the nines. Their hair is coiffed into perfectly colored curls, their nails are polished and shiny, their clothes, although they may hint of too much love for the 1980s, are always immaculate, and they seem to spend most of their days wondering from one jewelry/kitchen appliance/Tupperware party to the next. But what amazes me is when you visit those same women at their home, chances are they've just come in from mowing the back twenty, shelling pecans, buying live worms for the fish bait, or painting a fence. Southern women may look, and act like submissive little women, but really, they are everything but. Their nails will always look perfect, but they can shoot a rattlesnake as well as the next guy, and may know more about how to skin a boar than you want to know.

What surprises me, more than the dialectic nature of southern women, is the love for the land that most poeple down here seem to feel. Most people I know, including husband-dear talk about buying a piece of land out in the middle of nowhere when they retire. While in Europe, people may fantasize about a house in the south of France, or a boat, or an RV, people in this neck of the woods fantasize about owning horses, fishing in their own pond, dealing with downed trees, and seeing the sun come up on their own land. It's quite contagious too. Because think about it, doesn't a rocking chair on a porch, overlooking a field, some trees, some horses, and maybe a dirt road winding off into the distance sound great?