(and proud of it!)
I am a true southerner. Southern born and Southern bred. Southern to the bone. Sweet potato pie and shut my mouth, as the Alabama band sang. Proud to be from the land of magnolia trees and steel magnolia women. I can't think of any other place in the world that is so much an entity unto itself. Part of the union, but still apart in many ways. It's a select club that those of us whose membership was a birthright feel smug about when foreigners ask to join. We welcome everyone with open arms, but living here doesn't make you southern. As they say, if the cat has kittens in the oven that don't make 'em biscuits!
As proud as I am of being born Southern, however, I have a secret. I don't admit this to many people, but as long as y'all promise not to tell anyone.... *looks carefully over her shoulder and whispers* "I'm not a purebred Southerner."
That's right. I'm a mixed breed. My daddy's family's generations-of-Southern blood was tainted when my daddy met my mama. And mama was not only a Yankee (born and bred in Carmel, Indiana) but she was a damned Yankee. (That's one that visits down here and decides to stay. And brings their family.)
My favorite commercial of all time was one for an underarm deodorant that featured a Southern belle in the arms of her Yankee lover. The man says in a fakely deep voice "I forgot to use my Ban deodorant on my trip down South." The belle fans herself and says "Oh my, a damp Yankee." Anybody else remember that? If you want to see it, I just checked and like every other bit of useless trivia in the world, someone has posted it on YouTube. I swear I expect to see my last mammogram displayed on YouTube someday. Where DO people come up with this stuff? Anyway, the clip is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7AQYe4Nisg
I love the South's history, even the shameful parts. And no it's not true that we are in denial about who won The Unfortunate Incident known to the rest of the world as the Civil War (trust me, there was nothing 'civil' about it!). We know full well that the North was the victor. We also know that if the Union army had been fighting any other group of people of the same numbers anywhere else in the world they'd have won the war in four months. They bit off more than they could chew though when they stomped their big old army boots onto the Motherland. It took four years for them to beat us into what they laughingly referred to as "submission." And before he finally said uncle, Johnny Reb took a big chunk out of Billy Blue so he wouldn't forget just how hard we can bite. I don't believe 'the South will rise again', as so many redneck bumper stickers claim. I don't believe She ever fell. She just got banged around a bit. Bruised but not broken. And while I'm ranting here, let me tell you that the Dixie flag that many of you have bellowed and bitched about until it was taken off our states' capitol buildings was NOT a battle flag and it's only the redneck bigots of the world (of all races) who keep it in the news as a symbol of hate. Read your history books. The real ones. Not the ones that are one-sided in EITHER direction! (I had family on both sides of The War, so I can keep a pretty good balance on the issue) I don't believe slavery was right (duh) but I also don't believe that slavery was the true and only cause of the war. Most of our Union founding fathers got their fortunes from the backs of their slaves; so unlike so many things that truly are, slavery wasn't just a "southern thing." Again, read your history books. (Oddly, I discovered when doing some genealogy years ago... the southern half of my family, from Texas and Alabama, never owned slaves. According to records I uncovered at the time, the Yankee side of the family did. Go figure.) As another note, it was Yankee ships that went to Africa and bought men, women and children who had already been enslaved by warring tribes. Almost as many of these poor unfortunate people went into homes and factories in the North as there were in the South. They just referred to them as "the servants" in the North and we called it like it was and called them slaves. It was wrong. We admit it. We can't fix it. Get over it.
There's way more to the South than just an interesting history and beautiful landscapes. I love Southern food. There is no meal in the world that can compare to hush puppies, turnip greens, pinto beans, fried catfish, fried chicken, REAL barbecue (if it's cooked with sauce it ain't real barbecue!), fried okra, baked squash, sweet potato fries and a big old slice of pecan pie. Anything "peach" will always add a taste of Southern to your diet. And is never too hard to come by. We eat or drink just about anything made out of peaches down here. Peach pie. Peach cobbler. Peach preserves. Peach jam. Peach marmalade. Peach shortcake. Peach ice cream. Peach schnapps. Peach divinity. Fried peach pies. Upside down peach cake. 
I love to hear Southerners talk. You can close your eyes and let our words flow over your body soothing your soul like slipping a silk nightie over your shoulders and letting it slide down over the curves. A lot of true Southern accents are being swallowed up by all the diversity that has assimilated the South. Our major cities are big draws for large corporations that bring in people from all over the world. And then there are the mixed breed kids (remember, you promised to keep my secret...shhhhh) who grow up in a household with one purebred Southern parent and one foreigner. I can remember when kids laughed at me in the seventh grade when I read aloud an essay and it included the word "oil." I pronounced it "Oiyl." The way it says to in the dictionary (the English one, not the Southern one at http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/southernese.html) Silly me. I was told that the way I said it was the sound a spring makes. Boing. Oil. That stuff that BP is lettin' ruin our Gulf is supposed to be referred to as "Oawl." Practice. You'll get it right eventually.Any discussion of southern accents always boils down to how you say and spell y'all. It is supposed to be pronounced to sound like Yawl. We never say "you all" and we don't make it plural. Y'all can be one person or their whole family. Another dead giveaway of whether or not you were raised Southern is whether you know what to answer when someone asks you "How's your mama'n'em."
I love fall and spring in the south. It isn't any prettier anywhere in the world. It almost makes up for the summer. Almost. Winter isn't bad in the South when you look at the map and see the temps in South Dakota and Canada, but it's pretty hard to figure out how to dress when you live somewhere that can have snow on the ground one week and you wear shorts when you build a fence the next one. Temperatures can drop down here as fast as panties on prom night. But, you always know that no matter how cold it gets, it's going to break soon and there'll be daffodils popping through by February. Of course there are some things I don't like and can't wax poetic about in the South. We aren't too proud of our fire ants, tornadoes, Tammy Faye Bakker, kudzu, and bigoted rednecks. But, we'll take your mind off that by offering you a big old glass of lemonade (or wine, hey, we're not uncivilized) while we sit out on the veranda and talk about pine trees and family and corn on the cob fresh out of the field,
crawdads and okra and beautiful fescue grass, country music, bluegrass fiddlers, slow talkers and deep thinkers and all the other wonderful things that may make you Yankees think of us as "simple." We're proud to be. Simply Southern. Simply Proud. That pretty much sums it up. 
