Sweet Tea and Graciousness:What Southerners Always Knew

I can’t claim any one state as home really.  We moved a lot when I was growing up, Michigan to Texas to Pennsylvania to New Jersey to Texas to Florida to Texas….and it didn’t get any better when I joined the Army..Nor did it settle down when I met Marc and married him because although I was out of the military he was in the Marines.

I am told I don’t have much of an accent that anyone can pinpoint and  I don’t have a lot of things that I do that make people point at me and say, “AHA! Texas..AHA! Jersey!”

There is one thing about southern women, real southern women, that I admire a lot. I don’t see it so much in the young women, nor the women  my own age, however in the generation just before me I do see it.  Graciousness.  Something that goes beyond manners and seems ingrained in them.  My spiritual mom abounds with graciousness.  She is able to correct you so sweetly it takes days to realize that you have been corrected. I am quite sure that if a thief broke into her house she would offer him  a glass of sweet tea and a cookie.

That is what got me started on this train of thought today.  I was scanning the news and saw this headline: Robbery Attempt Ends When Victim Offeres Iced Tea .

See, it was a Japanese lady but I bet she was from SOUTHERN Japan.

I  think you can change the world with a glass of sweet tea and a soft voice.

When I am out in public I hear women screeching at their kids, screeching at their husbands, screeching at each other, and I do mean screeching.  Their language is rough and vulgar, jokes are coarse, even the t-shirts have questionable comments displayed across the chest.

And see, they  don’t seem to drink sweet tea.  They drink tea with nutrasweet, tea with splenda, tea with the other stuff, or tea unsweetened but not sweet tea.

Maybe we just need more sugar.

Image:Morguefile.com