Country road, take me home to the place where I belong

Yes friends, I'm feeling prosaic again, and this time it's with John Denver stuck in my head. It's Monday, just before 11am, and in a little less than three days I will be on an airplane (see I avoided the second John Denver reference just now) and returning to the Homeland. Or, as I refer to it among my fellow Southerners, I'm going back to God's country. The land of sweet tea and grits and fresh seafood and temperatures above 60. I always remembered October as the time of year when it started to get chilly at night back home. Football games, rolling houses, parades up and down the boulevard, sitting outside and saying to myself that I might want to go get a sweatshirt. Here in Boston it's a different story. We're already weatherproofing the windows and preparing to have the oil heat turned on and I'm sitting here wearing a scarf already. Crazy. But when my momma fetches me from the airport on Thursday morning, I know that the humidity will reach out and fog up my sunglasses just like it used to and I will have to peel off the layers one by one and throw them in the back seat of the car. I'm already fantasizing about fried shrimp on a po-boy.

Sidebar: my friend Sherri came to visit last week from New York and when she asked me about the places in town we needed to see, after I listed the historic locations I began to rattle off the best pubs and restaurants. She says to me, "Are we planning on eating our way through Boston?" This raised a very interesting subject: the associations of food with regional memory. I know that I'm a foodie, but I never realized how much I associate the comforts of home with the food. My grandmother's marinated pork chops, cuban steak, black beans & rice. Snowballs from Sal's on Metairie road. The tea shop in Victoria and their scones. Timothy Taylor's Landlord Ale at the Great Western Pub in Exeter. Shipley's Donuts.
There are other sensual associations, but I guess for me, food is the strongest. Shortly followed by smell, but that is another blog for another time.

Must go and translate French for my lesson. Wow, I'm hungry now!

And to the DP, I'm going to beat you to Ace's toes. It's on like Donkey Kong.