I just moved a few weeks ago and I'm finally feeling settled in my new house.  Don't get me wrong, I still have unpacked boxes and I don't know where a lot of things are, including most of my pots and pans.

In fact, the spare bedroom looks more like a rent-by-the-month storage room than a place actual people live.  The mattress is leaning against the wall, boxes are stacked one on top of the other, and the closet has become a shove-everything-in-it space.

But my pantry is stocked, my fridge is full and my computer is hooked up.  I'm a single man and we're simple like that.  Give us the basics and we're generally happy.

I've even changed my address with my bank and my credit card.  Unfortunately, the bill people also have my new address.

In the South, we do things a little bit differently.  We move at a slower pace, for sure, but only because we choose to do so.  We talk slower but we leave out unneeded syllables so we actually say things in the same amount of time.  (It's true, I've actually measured it.)

Visiting folks is Southern pastime.  Like baseball and fishing and chasing fireflies.  It's encoded into our genetics.  It's part of what makes us Southern.

We love fried chicken and sweet tea and banana pudding.  We crave the first sweet watermelon of the season and can't wait to shuck that first stalk of silver queen corn.

We can sit outside on a warm summer night and listen to the crickets chirp and be perfectly at peace with the world. 

Southerners aren't that hard to figure out.

But that waving-at-strangers thing; that one's always had me puzzled.

The most hectic time in our lives is the short month between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  And it's generally more hectic for the women in our families.  You run from here to there and then back again because you're looking for that little Doohickey that Timmy said he absolutely needed or he'd die.

Then, because that Doohickey is on sale for $3 less at a store across town, and it's the principle of the matter at that point, you fight traffic for a half hour, drive around for another half hour to find a parking place, search for another half hour for that exact Doohickey because if you get the off-brand that looks the same and works the same and feels the same but isn't the same, you'll hear about it on Christmas morning in the form of a temper tantrum with lots of screaming and flailing and crying.  Then, after the pimply teenage clerk finds the only one in the store, it's been opened and damaged and he gives it to you with a shrug saying it's his break time.

Remember when you were growing up and your mom made a cake from scratch?  The best part of the whole process wasn't the cake or even the icing.  It was licking the bowl.
    
It's the simplest of pleasures sometimes that mean the most.
    
My sister and I used to take turns between licking the beaters and the bowl.  If one got the bowl, the other got the beaters.  The next time it switched.  Chocolate cakes, pound cakes, lemon cakes.  It didn't matter.  Any cake batter would do.
    
So when my mom made a cake this past Thanksgiving, she was excited to let my nephews lick the bowl.  They're four and six, that perfect age where the world is always right and licking sweet cake batter from a bowl is as good as it gets.