What I miss about Alabama

I moved away 7 years ago, to San Diego. San Diego is paradise, but there are a few things I miss about home.

Slaw dogs with western sauce at the Andalusia Dairy Queen
Dreamland (the original in Tuscaloosa)
Boiled peanuts (nobody hear has even heard of them)
Watermelon (yeah, we get 'em, but they just don't taste right)
Peaches from Chilton County (the peaches here are dry)
Going to Bryant-Denny to scream my fool head off
Christmas Eve at my Grandmother's house

And everything Claire Lynch sings about in the song Alabama State of Mind

Y'all have a Happy New Year.

I decamped to follow a job north in 1997, but I'm on the way to good ol' Fairhope in the morning for a week... just hoping the WEAR blackout of The Game won't happen.

I can't imagine a station in Bama blacking out that Game.

They're feuding with their cable carrier, but they vow the game will be seen via the regular airwaves. Doesn't look like it. I may end up taking my 90-year-old mom (big Tide fan) to a sports bar!

Except, I don't know who Clarie Lynch is. All the other stuff sounds good.

Happy New Year!

is a bluegrass singer/songwriter from Tuscaloosa. She also formed the Front Porch String Band with fellow Bama students.

Here are the lyrics. It's a great song:

There's a lasting impression
forever in my mind
a mental picture of a place
that I call home
and whenever this big city starts to move too fast
I can kick off these shoes and flip it on.

I see a white farm house and a flat bed truck
and an old barn filled with winter hay
and the barge out in the channel takes its own sweet time
by tonight he'll be a hundred miles away

I can float across the river
wade on up the creek
walk on down a country road just killing time
no matter where I go I'll always be
in an Alabama state of mind

well I can still smell the dirt of a new plowed field
or watch the sun set on the river 'til it's gone
and all god's creatures come alive on a moonlit night
and make a joyful noise all of their own.

and on a laid back summer Sunday, after church
kinfolk come around and visit for awhile
and I can almost taste what's on my plate
Sunday dinner cooked up Southern style

I can float across the river
wade on up the creek
walk on down a country road just killing time
no matter where I go I'll always be
in an Alabama state of mind

If you catch me in a day dream you will know that I;m
in an Alabama state of mind

moved from Maine to San Diego she was in shock over the cost of housing.

we're in a fairly decent small (900 square feet) 2 bedroom with a decent yard. We pay $1,500. Every month.

I'll check her out!

and moved near Santa Cruz, CA, 7 years ago! But I lived in Massachusetts for a few years and in Maryland for a lot of years after I left Alabama.

The area I am in is very beautiful and the climate is moderate, but it is exorbitantly expensive.

I miss turnip greens and peach cobbler and the little town I grew up in.

small world. My first job was with Jimmy Faulkner at the DQ. I graduated from Pleasant Home in '83.

Did you know a recent winner of Survivor is from Samson?

I was born just before Pearl Harbor. My parents were living in Linden at the time, but there was no hospital there. My mother went to stay with her sister and her husband, Frances and Kyle Parks, who lived in Andalusia, so I could be born in the hospital there.

When I was six months old, we moved to Bay Minette and lived there until the end of World War II. My father was the assistant county agent for Baldwin County. He tried to enlist in the Army both in Baldwin County and Mobile County, but P.O. Davis, the state head of the agriculture department and his boss, vetoed his enlistment saying my father was needed in Baldwin County to help with the production of potatoes. A few years ago, I was doing some research on that time of my life. My father had died, but Auburn University sent me a copy of one of my father's annual reports. In it, my father praised the high school boys who came from other counties to Baldwin County to help harvest potatoes because so many of the men who usually worked in the fields were in the Service.

I was only four years old when we moved to Clarke County, but I remember my mother saying that when we lived in Bay Minette I used to play with a Faulkner boy who lived on our street! I'm pretty sure that she said his father ran for Governor.

there are at least two people posting here from Andalusia/Covington County, but I can't recall who they are just now.

small world, indeed.

before I go to the California site. California is such a large state geographically and it has such a huge population that it feels more like a country than a state to me.

I don't know how to start a new thread, but this seems like a good place to thank whoever gave me a Valentine.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.