SOUTHERN STATEMENT
I'm a Native New Yorker who's now Southern. When I came here I didn't think it'd get a hold on me, but it did. Living in Charlottesville, VA via too many other places to count, it's now a life of mountains and big sky and dogwoods and hawks. Of back roads and wood- burning stoves. Of bourbon and mint from the garden in May and swimming in the river in August. It's the long talks with old-timers of how their descendants were run out of what's now Shenandoah National Park-mountain people getting by as moonshiners. And it's standing on the grounds of Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia, with the columns of its Rotunda and his ghost and magnolias and people from the world over. Just like me. It's the slow pace of living that's tamed me. And I never planned it.
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