Frame of Reference

It occurs to me that to really know a place, it has to be absorbed. Visits don’t seem to count.

A case in point is a recent HGTV show featuring designers from all over the country competing to design a winning space in Florida. All of the teams have proven track records in their respective markets. There are no duds in the bunch. Yet when placed side by side in identical spaces and asked to perform, some of them clearly and consistently struggle more than others.

Trying mightily to interpret “Florida”, the flavor of the place they actually call home nonetheless comes through in every design, due (in my humble opinion) to the fact that their home turf has been absorbed to the point that their knowledge of it is intuitive, no matter what other design language they try to speak.

On a similar note, after twenty years worth of annual visits to Key West, we were fortunate enough to snag a house for a month, leaving me truly astonished at the depth of what I still had to learn about the place. Driving home that epiphany was the remark later made by a long-time island resident, who told me he had lived there for 28 years and still did not feel like he had grasped it fully.

Having said all that, it does seem to me that there are commonalities throughout the South that transcend a single town or even region. The same holds true, I am sure, for other regions of the country - New England, the upper Midwest. These common traits boil down to that sense of place that equips us to articulate with authenticity.

Writing a decent and compelling piece about a place only visited is within the grasp of every good writer, but repeating that achievement on a regular basis soon causes the well to run dry. This of course goes straight to the proven admonishment offered to all aspiring writers: “Write what you know.”

I have mentioned before that when I sat down one night to record a story about my mama and her sister, Aunt Dot, the thought ran no further than the ending of that piece. Now ten years later, to my complete amazement, the words still come. I have discovered that my home turf is not just the small town where my roots have resided for 8 or 10 generations, but rather the South as a whole. From Texas to Maryland, the voices are very often the same.

Maybe one of these days you will see a piece here about autumn in New England or the smell of rain coming at me across an Iowa cornfield, but if that day comes, I’m pretty sure the stories will be told with a Southern accent.

Photo of Jekyll Island, Georgia by Beth Yarbrough.