But I didn’t have her patience. I was a feral, barefoot girl who climbed pecan trees and fought with snapping turtles. Bradley and I were oil and water—except the oil was also complaining about the water’s pH balance.
We grew up in the sticky, kudzu-choked humidity of central Georgia. He grew up in a gray, tastefully expensive suburb of Boston. And every summer, his parents would ship him down to my grandmother’s farm for two weeks of “family connection.” Those two weeks were my annual descent into hell. My Only Bitchy Cousin Is a Yankee-Type Guy- The...
“Why do you come down here every year if everything we do is wrong, everything we eat is garbage, and everything we say sounds stupid to your fancy Yankee ears?” But I didn’t have her patience
That night, after everyone went to bed, I found him on the back porch, looking at the stars. The sky in Georgia is nothing like the sky in Connecticut. He had a beer—a Miller Lite, because he was still a Yankee-Type Guy and couldn’t drink a proper sweet ale to save his life. We grew up in the sticky, kudzu-choked humidity
My grandmother just smiled and said, “Well, bless his heart. He gets that from his father’s side.”