The best thing about this essay besides the essay itself? We've asked Jeanne to write more for us. Betcha' can't wait until next month ... Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in Virginia and live in Norhern California now. In imagination and memory Virginia will dwell within me as long as I live as a place of summer rain, the brilliant maples of October on Barton Street, cozy nights and peaceful walks in the woods at Skyland, a walk in a blizzard up to Columbia Pike to buy a jug of Gallo Port, wanting poems in a bottle, and such memories that make a life that's a lot about the place where it happens.

Southern Legitimacy Statement In my house, Saturday nights meant fried chicken and mashed potatoes and Buck Owens on the little black and white that sat in the corner by the fireplace. Like a proper southern man, Daddy grew all our vegetables, raised beef cattle and filled the freezer with venison. My mother taught me how to make hot biscuits and red-eye gravy when I was in elementary school. Our neighbors sometimes called the police when our rabbit hounds got a bit stirred up and bellowed all night. I never knew there were people who did not put sugar in their iced tea, didn't eat cornbread with their white beans, and didn’t say y’all when addressing more than one person until I went to college. I never wanted to go anywhere else. Why would I? The South has Emmy Lou Harris, the Mississippi River, Flannery O’Connor, flaming red azaleas, catfish and stone-ground corn grits.