What the South is Really Like

I hope you Coastal occasional readers get a kick out of this one. I attended a wildflower lecture today, given by a Georgia Master Gardener. Georgia Master Gardeners are ordinary people like us who have taken a lot of courses and have a lot of experience with gardening. This particular lady gardener (she would choose "lady" over "female") was a very (naturally) well-preserved senior citizen. I have transcribed several moments from the lecture directly into my novel-in-progress, but here is the best one. Apologies for the roughness of the writing. I had to do it very quickly before I went to get Lola at daycare. "Helen" is the wildflower lecturer.

Helen continued, focusing very closely on the spotted wintergreen. She paused, and added,
“A lot of people—do we have any Yankees here?—a lot of people call this one pipsissewa.” The half-filled room checked itself out covertly—no Yankee presence here. Judith realized that she was one with the group. She belonged because she was Southern. She could see the similarity now between all of them, the ten or so women and one man in the audience. Even without being able to look directly at the people in the back, she knew that they all shared that softness, that manner of looking and speaking, which her few Midwestern colleagues in Valdosta had found so artificial and off-putting.