Twenty-five ways to know you might have grown up behind the Magnolia Curtain
by Ann Allen Geoghegan
1. You can properly pronounce Oktibbeha, Neshoba, Chata, DeKalb, Kosciusko, Decatur, Yazoo, Pascagoula, Picayune, Scooba, and Tishomingo.
2. You know how many fish, collard greens, turnip greens, peas, beans, etc., make up "a mess."
3. A tornado warning siren is your signal to go out in the yard with a camcorder.
4. Your idea of a traffic jam is ten cars waiting to pass a tractor on the highway.
5. You've ever had to switch from "heat" to "A/C" and back to “heat” in the same day.6. You know that the true value of a parking space is not determined by the distance to the door, but by the availability of shade.
7. Stores don't have bags, they have sacks and they are used to sort things for your next front porch sale.
8. You've seen people wear bib overalls at funerals and you have seen 40 log trucks line the road when a skidder driver was escorted to his final resting place.
9. You think everyone from a bigger city has an accent.
10. You measure distance in minutes. You also know a fur piece can be a mile or twenty miles down the road.
11. It doesn't bother you to use an airport named for a man who died in an airplane crash.
12. Your teacher calls you by your daddy’s or your older brother’s name.
13. You can follow directions like: “Go a little ways till you see where old man Turner’s store used to be and turn right and go a pretty fur piece to where the big oak tree that Katrina blew down was and it’s just a hop-skip further down on the left.”
14. You listen to the weather forecast before picking out an outfit.
15. You know "awhile back" is anywhere from last week to a few years ago, it doesn't matter, Mississippi time is different!
16. Someone you know has used a football or hunting schedule to plan their wedding date.
17. You take your tea with ice and lemon and not milk.
18. A bad traffic jam involves two cars staring each other down at a four-way stop, each determined to be the most polite and let the other go first.
19. You aren't surprised to find movie rental, ammunition, and bait all in the same store.
20. A Mercedes Benz isn't a status symbol, but a Chevy Silverado Extended Bed Crew Cab Dually is.
21. You know where grits come from and how to eat them.
22. You learned multiplication and shotgun gauge sizes at about the same age.
23. You can put 100 Mississippians in a room and half of them will discover they're related, even if only by marriage.
24. You are 100% Mississippian if you have ever heard or had this conversation:"You wanna coke?" "Yeah." "What kind?" "Dr. Pepper."
25. And for all ya’ll that are not from Mississippi but have lived here for a long time, all y'all need a sign to hang on y'alls front porch that reads "I ain't from Mississippi, but I got here fast as I could! "
