We lived until I was nearly six in the middle of the woods off of a back road named for my grandmother's Irish descendants. Our driveway was gravel. Our dogs lived outside nearly 100 percent of the time, and they got their joy from treeing 'coons and chasing 'possums.

Vacations have nearly always been to the Gulf Coast. If we went to a beach anywhere else we were disappointed. I came to the realization during high school that the end of the pier extending into Mobile Bay in Fairhope, Ala. was where I felt closest to God, while overlooking a marsh off Georgia's barrier islands or South Carolina's low country are a close second.

My earliest memory is in Savannah. The furthest west I've been is New Orleans. Furthest north? Virginia.

I've never left the south. I guess there are people who pity me for it. Part of me wonders what's so great about John Denver's wild Montana skies or the Big Apple. I'd like to go to Norway some day, but only on the pretense that I can return home to Metro Atlanta, or maybe, some time in the future, L.A. (Lower Alabama, of course) and lay my head on a pillow in a house with a porch and a fridge containing sweet tea.

I never want to live anyplace that wasn't mentioned by Margaret Mitchell, Rick Bragg, or Pat Conroy. I want to always be a few hours' drive from the Appalachians or the Atlantic. I want people to offer me key lime pie after dinner. I don't want to have to explain my meaning when I say "fixin' to" or "petered out."

I want to always be comfortable making fun of people who say Hotlanta, and I want to always take pity on people who are accustomed to heavy snowfall.

I never want to live where people prefer Pepsi, where Chick-fil-A is foreign, and where Jimmy Buffett isn't a road trip staple.

I want to always be surrounded by ravenous SEC fans, people who don't understand soccer, and people who think Mark Richt hung the moon and Nick Saban numbered the stars, even though they're quick to give that glory to the Good Lord when it's no longer time to kid around.

College graduation scares me. Not because I'll have to get a big girl job and branch out, but because that branching out means I might have to leave the South. I see stirrings of this painful truth already with my big brother. His chemical engineering degree could send him to Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin -- the list goes on, but it doesn't include many states in the Deep South. I've already arrived at the conclusion that a future that involves me living somewhere where people don't say "y'all" and understand the importance of a sturdy porch swing or how to drive in Atlanta traffic is not a future in which I am interested.

Maybe it's because of all the fried food hardening in my arteries, but this place is in my blood. When I'm away I feel it calling me home. When I'm with people who aren't from around here, I feel its pull. Mom and Dad donated 46 chromosomes, and I guess the South did too. Southern architecture, southern flora and fauna, southern artists and authors are consistently my favorite. We are all somehow connected through our southernness, through our shared roots of descendants who arrived here before us, sweating to plant crops and picking them to provide for their families. (My grandmother spent her childhood and adolescence picking cotton.)

I will not hesitate to call myself a Southerner, but I will never sympathize with those who continue to fly the Rebel flag. We are in a different time period. We move forward from some of the standards our grandparents kept to, but regardless of the progress we make as we conform to the open-mindedness of the rest of the United States, something deeper than what is written in history books that calls us back to the land where peach trees grow and lend their name to a wealth of cities, streets and businesses.

I was born in the Deep South to a Tennessee mama and a Georgia daddy. This red clay is in my blood, and I can feel it in my bones. I've never left the South, and in the long term, I don't plan to. Because this is home.