Growing up, the South was, for me, a couple of hundred miles below the Mason-Dixon Line where my cousins lived, in Washington, D.C. They had a big sprawling family, like ours, but it was the South and it felt different.
When I went back to visit, it had been raining most of the week. I took a car out of the city headed south toward Maryland. The hillsides were lush and green and thankful, as if they seemed finally willing to give up some hidden secret if you just looked in the right place for it. /THE OLD LINE
