Pound cake, key lime pie, red velvet, oh my!

Kudzu Bakery co-founder Joey Rabon shares his experience starting a Southern-style bakery with his wife, Stacy, in Georgetown, South Carolina, in 1989 on the latest episode of SHFB. The bakery now has four locations across South and North Carolina, and while they sell a lot more than pastries these days, desserts are their bread and butter.

The bakery prides itself on making products that look homemade. At one point, they toyed with the idea of putting an oven in one of their store locations so customers could pick up their orders inside the oven and tell people that their pie, cake, or what have you, literally “just came out of the oven.”

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“When we first opened, if it wouldn’t look appropriate at my grandmother’s house, at a dinner or at her after-church social thing, we probably didn’t sell it,” Joey tells me. “We didn’t do cannolis or tiramisu and other things. We kind of just did things that we like to think Southern people would recognize.”

Side note: I was lucky enough to try their cookies and a slice of quiche, and I mean it when I say I have a new favorite bakery in town. I also mean it when I say that if I transferred their cookies or one of their pies to a plate and brought them to a dinner party, nobody would know I bought them.

Joey notes the importance of using real butter in most recipes, as well as fresh ingredients, many of which come from local farms.

“Our pie doughs are rolled by hand. … I don’t want it to look like it came from a machine. I want it to look like a human actually made this product,” he says on the latest episode of SHFB.

And, of course, Joey discusses the meaning of Southern hospitality and whether that concept still exists today—from the unique perspective of a local business owner.

A young Florida woman named Emma Grace began documenting sweet moments with her Georgia-born grandmother, whom she calls Memama, after Memama’s husband of 50 years died to try and lift her spirits. Their first video on TikTok shows Emma Grace and Memama eating ice cream together. (@not.eg).

The rest is history.

@not.eghappy APRIL FOOLS day🤣💖 #foodie #memamafy #grandmasoftiktok #aprilfools #prank #bluebellicecream #ghirardelli #funny #southern #thesouth #aprilfoolsday

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The duo has since gone viral on social media, making videos in which they cook and eat together, shop, dance, and travel. On rarer occasions, Emma Grace pulls harmless pranks on her Memama. Some of the videos also include Emma Grace’s mom—Memama’s daughter—Sabrina Burke.

The close connection between women comes naturally to them; it was almost like talking to three different versions of one person.

Emma Grace has a very special connection with her mother and Memama—something not everybody gets to experience. It feel both unique and familiar at the same time.

The three women recognize the significance of their relationship, and that is why Emma Grace’s social media presence offers something comforting to her followers: a bridge between generations that can sometimes feel very far apart.

@not.eg"Im a southern grandmother of course I”…. #emmagraceandmemama #memamatok #memamafy #grandmasoftiktok #grandma #southern #southernaccent #challenge #ofcourse #grandmother #fromthesouth #tiktoktrend #trends #ofcoursetrend

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On the latest episode of Southern Hospitality for Beginners, I had the privilege of interviewing all three women: Emma Grace, Memama, and Sabrina Burke. I wasn’t sure what to expect from these Southern TikTok stars, but the talking points and laughs throughout this episode came naturally. They were all so down-to-earth and easy to chat with.

Each woman shares a bit of wisdom in this episode, each from a unique perspective. For example, Memama’s advice on making a marriage work for 50 years? Get yourself “a Bible and a black negligee.”

@not.egmemamas being BAD😈😂 #memamatok #memamafy #southern #south #southernaccent #grandma #grandmasoftiktok #emmagraceandmemama #prank #googleeyes #googlyeyes #googleeyeschallenge #fyp #foryou

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As my dad put it after listening, “What a bunch of characters. You didn’t have to do any work for this one.”

It’s true. I barely made an edit. Please tune in to what may be my funniest, sweetest episode yet, wherever you get your podcasts.

The Southern accent as we know it won’t survive forever, according to North Carolina State University Prof. Robin Dodsworth, a linguist who has been studying language shifts in Raleigh for years.

In fact, the Southern accent is actively disappearing—and it has been for quite some time due to various socioeconomic factors. In North Carolina and other Southern states, the migration of Northerners after World War II, for job and business development opportunities, continues to have a significant impact on vanishing Southern dialects, Robin explains on the latest episode of Southern Hospitality for Beginners.

“So it was especially at that time that you started to get people showing a greater tendency to move out of the regions they had come from, which also led to greater awareness of things like local and regional dialects,” Robin tells me.

“A lot of times, those local and regional dialects were negatively evaluated, right? They sounded too local or, you know, in the case of the Southern dialects … they were perceived as sounding unintelligent or slow or something like that, right? Or conservative. So it’s really all of those factors that leads to the disappearance of the Southern accent.”

As one of those Northerners myself, with a deep love for Southern twang, I find Robin’s research a little tragic.

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Those who still have Southern accents today tend to skew older in age, live in more rural areas, and represent a more working-class population, but there are always exceptions to these propensities. People also tend to associate Southern accents with hospitality, kindness, and even conservative political views, based on real-life experiences as well as depictions of Southerners in media.

And it’s not just a trend in North Carolina, where Robin’s research takes place. Accents are becoming more diluted everywhere from coastal Southern states to the Deep South.

Robin and I discuss everything from the origins of the Southern accent to the increasingly frequent use of “y’all” to Southern stereotypes depicted in My Cousin Vinny. She also reveals her thoughts on where, and among whom, the Southern accent will survive longest in the future.

Listen to the latest episode of SHFB wherever you get your podcasts.

Waking up to lots of noise after a snowstorm was normal: plows slowly scraping their way down snow- and ice-covered streets, neighbors shoveling sidewalks and pulling out snowblowers, the beeping of reversing utility trucks.

My uncle would drive his truck all over our neighborhood, plowing friends’ and families’ driveways out of the goodness of his heart.

But on Sunday morning, after Winter Storm Gianna passed through my new home state of North Carolina, things were eerily quiet. We got more snowfall (16-18 inches) than the state has seen in more than two decades, and other than clear grocery store shelves of Wonderbread and milk (why those two products, specifically, always sell out before a storm here is a mystery to me), nobody could do a damn thing about it. Local home improvement stores were sold out of basic items like rock salt and shovels. Grocery stores sold out of MORTON’S salt, too; I’m assuming because people used that to treat their driveways instead of the rock salt.

I personally did not believe the news when meteorologists predicted 10-plus inches of snow over the weekend, because the weekend prior, there were rumors that we’d get 18 inches, and we got two, maybe, complete with a layer of ice that shuttered public schools for not one, not two, but three days.

Had it not been for my family's unwavering panic about the latest storm, I probably wouldn’t have made that last-minute run to the grocery store that we definitely needed before being trapped inside for three days.

Snow wouldn’t scare me, a New Englander, away from leaving the house to get groceries if need be, I naively thought. But it did…because the South does not do snow.

Southerners do not have the equipment necessary to clear their driveways, sidewalks, and roads, and Southern cities still do not have the infrastructure to manage snowfall that does occur every year, just not at the scale we saw last weekend.

On my walk around the neighborhood Sunday morning, I saw a few neighbors trying to do the job armed with brooms, rakes, and leafblowers. The only reason my street was plowed the morning after the storm is because I live along a public bus route.

Mostly, people just seem to sit and wait patiently for everything to melt away. That is fitting for the general attitude of the South that I have come to know and love: take your time, live life a little slower.

Others find themselves in big trouble.

A 100-car pileup left people stranded for five hours in Kannapolis, a suburb north of Charlotte, on Saturday evening. Crashes were reported across the city throughout the weekend as people drove on untreated highways and roads, some to their jobs and others to bars and restaurants, like any normal Saturday night, though nothing about the weather conditions that evening was normal.

Thousands of people across the South—everywhere from Tennessee to Mississippi and even Florida—are still without power as of Monday afternoon, and 30 people have died since snowstorms struck the region last week, according to The New York Times.

While this year’s conditions are far more disastrous than normal, there has been at least one day of snow, even if just a light dusting, that shuts everything down since I moved to North Carolina in 2022. So, my question is this: Should Southern states not be prepared for at least one day of snow per year? Should plow trucks not be stored away for at least one major winter weather event? Should home improvement stores not have enough shovels and rock salt in storage to equip neighborhoods with the right tools? Why is snow continuously overlooked as a non-problem below the Mason-Dixon line?

I’m not the first to ask these questions. In a 2018 Forbes article titled, “The South Gets Enough Snow Every Year That We Have No Excuse Not To Prepare,” former contributor Dennis Mersereau wrote, “Despite common wisdom, most of the south gets enough snow every year that an inch or two shouldn’t be the abject spectacle that almost always winds up unfolding. We’ve long passed the point where we should stop feigning surprise at how poorly we perform in the snow. We have no excuse not to be well-prepared for minor snowstorms in much of the southern United States.”

Mersereau goes on to suggest that Southern municipalities invest more in infrastructure like snow plows, or, “[a]t the very least, more local companies could offer contracting services to plow neighborhoods and apartment complexes so residents have a fighting chance to get out after it snows.”

But I have little faith that a major city like Charlotte could come up with a reasonable solution to this problem. Why? The city voted in the last election on Nov. 5, 2025, to increase the transportation tax from 7.25% to 8.25% to generate $19.4 billion over 30 years for improvements to the city’s light rail, on which two people were murdered in unrelated incidents last year, but there are still no (or few) security guards to be seen at light rail stops throughout the city since; roads that remain so disastrous a video-game designer created a game based on a very dangerous, real-life exit; and buses, which saw a 75% decrease in ridership between 2014 and 2022.

A few more plows would unfortunately be too much to ask.

When I think of coastal retreats, Mississippi does not come to mind. That’s why Bay St. Louis surprised me when my sister- and brother-in-law introduced me to the charming Gulf Coast town in November. It was my first time in Mississippi, and I was pleasantly surprised by the slow, quiet vacation spot and all it had to offer, from seafood restaurants to coffee shops to locally owned boutiques and antique stores.

We only spent a day there, so I didn’t get to take in all the town has to offer, but on this episode of Southern Hospitality for Beginners, Beverly Frater of the Hancock County Historical Society and Bay St. Louis-based interior designer Shannon Stage fill me in on the town’s rich history and Southern charm that appeal to visitors from all over the country.

As we made the hour-long drive in from New Orleans, past NASA’s Stennis Space Center and lots of colorful, single-story homes, we arrived in the Gulf Coast vacation spot and saw a group of children out for a swim…just before Thanksgiving!

We also saw low-hanging, Southern Live Oaks decorated with Christmas lights, signs at The Blind Tiger encouraging clientele to bring in their own catches of the day for the seafood restaurant to prepare for them, and local businesses operating from old homes off S. Beach Boulevard.

Shannon compares Bay St. Louis to Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show on the latest episode of SHFB.

“Imagine rows of cottages with yards…and if you took those little houses that you would see anywhere, I think, in the Deep South, but most particularly in Mississippi, and you plopped them down beside the shore, that’s what you would see,” she tells me.

She also said Southern charm and Southern hospitality sometimes go hand-in-hand, as they do in Bay St. Louis.

“A charming town, to me, is…a town that celebrates its history. You can see that in the buildings. They preserve the buildings in a way that makes them look inviting,” she says. “A charming town is one when you walk down the street, there’s a bench for you to sit. There are shops that are beautiful and inviting for you to walk in. There are restaurants.”

People in quaint, charming towns tend to be friendly, too, which is where Southern hospitality comes into play.

“You are greeted with warmth here,” Shannon tells me of Bay St. Louis.

Hear more about the Mississippi Gulf Coast town’s Southern hospitality and history anywhere you get your podcasts.

Did you send out Christmas cards this year?

Did you RSVP to the last wedding you were invited to?

Did you write a thank-you card for the last gift you recieved?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are keeping the dying art of hospitality alive, according to Hannah Brusven, founder and editor-in-chief of The Swish magazine.

The Swish offers a unique reader experience: limited ads and content that exmaines classical femininity. Think: Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Kate Middleton. The magazine observes but is not dedicated to the latest hot trends in women’s fashion and lifestyle.

I speak with Hannah, an eight-generation Georgian currently based in Nashville, on the latest episode of Southern Hospitality for Beginners. Hannah is a distant relative of Coca-Cola founder Asa Candler and Gone with the Wind author Magaret Mitchell. She was also a third-generation ballerina with the Atlanta Ballet.

We discuss her Southern roots, her magazine, her definition of femininity, what Southern hospitality looks like today, and more on this fascinating episode of SHFB, which you can find anywhere you get your podcasts.

“And it’s sad to me, sometimes, to see the way that that is dying out,” Hannah tells me of RSVP-ing and writing thank-you notes. “Apparently, a text will suffice as a thank you card these days. But at the end of the day, etiquette and these manners that we are taught, and that I am grateful that were shared with me from a young age, are really just ways of respecting other people.”

A special thank you to at The Girl’s Guide for introducing us!

Learn more about The Swish Magazine at: https://www.theswishmagazine.com/

Order the Winter 2025 Edition: https://www.theswishmagazine.com/preorder

Follow The Swish on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theswishmagazine/

In some popular coastal South Carolina towns, it is difficult to find beachfront property with enough space to spread your arms. And while vacationing in the Lowcountry is always relaxing, hotels and AirBnbs, like everything, have become places of ultra-convenience, with high-speed WiFi, televisions, gyms, room service, and everything else guests could need away from home to feel comfortable.

But perhaps being pushed outside one’s comfort zone is necessary to experience real relaxation and detachment from the outside world. This is what the Sea View Inn, a beachfront hotel in Pawley’s Island, offers its guests.

On today’s episode of “Southern Hospitality for Beginners,” we are stepping back in time to the 1930s, when the Sea View Inn—one of two remaining inns on Pawley’s Island—was first built. Hurricane Hazel destroyed the building, which sits on the beach, in the 1950s, but it was rebuilt to its original footprint in 1956. That structure remains standing today, and its interior is a reflection of what life was like at the inn nearly 70 years ago.

Visitors at the Sea View Inn feel like they’ve time-traveled. There is no AC in the main building; guests are encouraged to open their windows to the sea breeze on warm nights. Guests are offered a glass of sweet or unsweet tea when they walk in the door. Local chefs prepare traditional Southern cooking each night, and staff ring a bell to inform guests when dinner is being served.

The inn has a no-cell-phone policy, and while it does have WiFi, it only really works in one spot. But guests aren’t coming to the Sea View Inn for business or luxury; they’re coming to escape the outside world and sit in peace on the beautiful, white-sand beach where the hotel has stood since 1937.

Sassy Henry and her husband, Brian, took over ownership of the inn in 2002. On this very special episode of Southern Hospitality for Beginners, Sassy tells me about her family’s decision to drop everything and take over the inn more than two decades ago, whether Southern hospitality still exists today, and why it’s so important for the Sea View Inn to maintain its longstanding Southern roots.

Sassy describes the inn as a “rambling, white clapboard beachhouse” that brings people from all walks of life together every year to experience the unique slice of paradise that remains detached from the rest of the world. Approximately 90% of the inn’s guests are returning customers.

“Everybody’s on an equal playing field,” Sassy tells me of the inn and of Pawley’s in general. “They’re in their bathing suits and their t-shirts and their flip-flops. You don’t know who’s the bank president and who’s the firefighter, and everybody’s saving their money all year long to have their vacation.”

Hear more from Sassy on Episode 5 of “Southern Hospitality for Beginners.”

Southern Hospitality Magazine feature writer Apryl Thomas discusses her 20-year career traveling across the South and telling its stories.

Apryl shares some of her favorite destinations and festivals (some of which may surprise you) in the South on the latest episode of Southern Hospitality for Beginners.

She says her favorite part of her job as a magazine writer is “meeting the people and discovering new things and new places.” Particularly during a time when people are so distracted by their phones—a time when strangers would rather avoid conversation with each other than meet new people—Apryl says Southern hospitality is more special than ever.

Some Southerners tend to go out of their way to make conversation and share their history with out-of-towners because it’s in their nature. Storytelling is an important “art” of the South, but that culture has been dying for decades, she says.

“It’s more than porches and sweet tea. It’s about that connection,” Apryl tells me.

Hear more about Apryl’s love of the South on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and find Apryl’s writing at southernhospitalitymagazine.com.

Elizabeth Conner is an Alabama native and a mom of two. She was previously a featured writer for Evie Magazine and worked a day job in social work as a victims’ advocate.

In the latest episode of Southern Hospitality for Beginners, Elizabeth discusses her decision to move back home to Birmingham after college (something she’d never thought she’d do), why she loves living in the South, and more.

“It’s just a slower pace of life here. We’re not in a rat race. We’re not elbowing each other out of the way. Things just kind of…take your time, at your own pace. Everything just seems a lot more relaxed, I will say. And it’s a great place, in my opinion, to raise a family,” Elizabeth says.

Southerners take pride in bringing people together, whether that means '“entertaining” others, sharing resources, or helping those in need.

“My youngest child has special needs, and so the last six months have been kind of a rollercoaster emotionally, and our community has just shown up for us in amazing, incredible ways,” she says.

The South also has a lot more to offer than people think, Elizabeth tells me. Places like Birmingham, Charlotte, and Atlanta are booming with opportunity in finance, tech, and science, driving more and more families to relocate to Southern cities.

And despite the influx of people moving down South from elsewhere, Elizabeth still believes Southern hospitality is alive and well. Part of that culture means an emphasis on dressing up—particularly on weekends. People who aren’t from the South might critique the expectation of dressing up as Southerners caring too much about appearances, but it’s not about physical appearance, Elizabeth says; it’s about representing yourself and your family out in public.

“Dress for the game on Saturdays, dress for the Lord on Sundays,” she tell me.

Hear more about Elizabeth’s upbringing and Southern hospitality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My friend Evie Solheim (find her at The Girl’s Guide) comes from a long line of Carolinians. She’s the kind of Southerner who always has something witty to say without being rude; I don’t think I’ve ever heard her speak a bad word about another person.

To make matters better, her dad went to UNC-Chapel Hill, and her mom went to Duke, so I consider her a Tar-Heel State expert.

In the latest episode of “Southern Hospitality for Beginners,” Evie shares her thoughts on the North Carolina accents featured in the latest season of The White Lotus, the simultaneous impossibility and compellingness of the plotline of Outer Banks, and her fascination with one of North Carolina’s oldest legends: the Lost Colony.

Evie reflects on her family’s current lifestyle in West Virginia compared to her childhood outside Raleigh.

“Just the fact that we had these rhythms…to life. And, you know, you don’t realize that maybe you take life a little bit more slowly than like the rest of the world. You’re like, okay, yeah, we do have time to home-make sweet tea and biscuits and deviled eggs,” Evie tells me of life in the South, noting, however, that she does not like deviled eggs.

Does Southern hospitality still exist? Hear Evie’s thoughts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

One year ago today, Hurricane Helene barrelled through multiple states across the Southeast, killing a total of about 250 people and displacing thousands more.

The storm was particularly devastating for unsuspecting areas of the Appalachian Mountains in Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, and Southwestern Virginia. Of the 250 people who died as a result of the hurricane, about 108 were recorded in North Carolina alone.

Many have called Helene “biblical” and a “100-year storm.”

I was reporting for FoxNews.com at the time and traveled to the area to cover the hurricane’s aftermath in Fairview and Swannanoa. The only accurate way to describe the destruction is apocalyptic—or war-zone-like.

Water had piled up in the mountains after days of rainfall, even before Helene, and when the storm came through, it all had to go somewhere: down. The water flooded rivers and flew down mountain crevices at catastrophic speeds, destroying houses, businesses, and entire communities.

After a year of tireless rebuilding, significant progress has been made; homes are being rebuilt, and businesses that shuttered for months are reopening. But there is still so much more to be done. There are still houses hanging by threads off destroyed riverbanks. There are still businesses struggling to rebuild and reopen. There are still people who lost their homes living in tents and trailers on their land—people who are afraid they will lose their property if they move elsewhere due to drastic rezoning taking place after the hurricane.

Hurricane Helene caused an estimated $100 billion in damage, and places that rely heavily on tourism, especially in the summer and fall, are struggling to come back.

But one year later, I’m back in Western North Carolina to tell a different story on my own podcast, “Southern Hospitality for Beginners.” This story is one of hope and community and, of course, Southern hospitality.

Amid the rubble and unthinkable loss and unsalvageable past lives, resilient locals have participated in incredible rebuilding efforts. Other groups of people from across the country, too, have selflessly offered helping hands, from the Amish to military veterans to random guys who know how to build this and use heavy machinery.

This time, I visited Lake Lure and Chimney Rock, which weren’t immediately accessible by car after Helene because the roads were washed out. Even today, much of the route between Lake Lure and Faireview is a single lane with makeshift stoplights allowing lines of cars to move one at a time.

Both Chimney Rock and Lake Lure, which sit next to each other, are popular tourist destinations in the summer and fall, offering a myriad of outdoor activities, inns, eateries, and other entertainment. Lake Lure is famous for being a filming location for “Dirty Dancing” and other movies.

I was fortunate enough to stay at The Grafton Lodge, a bed and breakfast owned and operated by Richard and Kimberly Sayles, who shared the same lifelong dream of having their own B&B and opened the lodge in late 2016. Business had been decently successful until Helene.

Over a breakfast of local eggs, bacon, grits, toast, and apple butter, Richard Sayles told me about how he and his wife helped house people who lost everything after Helene. They also housed linemen and served free breakfasts to locals in need of a meal. Richard coordinated with others in the area to make sure locals had the equipment and personnel necessary to serve food to hundreds of survivors and deliver necessary supplies to those in hard-to-reach areas.

“Before the storm, I kind of had a take-care-of-my-own, prepper kind of mentality, where…I’m gonna be good, my family’s gonna be good, and I’m gonna defend what I have,” Sayles told me. “And then, right after that storm, I saw what was happening and realized that was stupid. I didn’t need to do that. I needed to help my neighbor.”

Sayles said it was “a beautiful thing” to witness his community—strangers and friends, locals and seasonal visitors—come together after the storm.

Ryan Dietrich, one of the locals who helped gather and distribute rarer supplies (Starlinks, gas, chainsaws, boots for military members mucking through wreckage), similarly said he feels a stronger sense of community after Helene.

“With the one-year anniversary coming up with Helene…I think it’s important to not just reflect on the hurt or what was lost but reflect on how lucky we are,” Dietrich said. “We have a future, and we have hope, and we have opportunity, and we have freedom, and we have safety. Whether people want to choose to believe that or not, until it’s gone, until you’ve experienced a place…where you don’t have the ability to work, to be safe, to rest well at night…we have options.”

“There’s a lot of silver linings that actually came from the storm,” he added.

Crissy Barnes Blanton is not from Chimney Rock, but she’s been living in the mountain town for the last five years. After her mom died in 2020, she reconnected with a childhood friend who lived in Chimney Rock named Lisa. Barnes Blanton didn’t know about Lisa’s disability when they reconnected, and she ended up temporarily relocating to Chimney Rock to help care for Lisa over the last several years.

On Sept. 27, 2024, Lisa decided to stay home and sit out the storm instead of evacuating, in part due to her disability. Her house on the Broad River was destroyed, and she was Chimney Rock’s only death resulting from the hurricane.

“She wasn’t the only one who did not evacuate,” Barnes Blanton said. “So many of us actually have only met and gotten close to each other since the flood. There are only 155 year-round residents. A lot of people don’t know it’s really a small community.”

“The street that I’m speaking of, the bridge was washed out, and the neighbors and the ones that live there, it was four or five months before they could access their street,” she said.

Since the flood, locals have treated Barnes Blanton like a member of the community, she explained.

“I would not have been able to heal as much as I have, which feels like only a tiny bit, had I been excluded. I wasn’t excluded. I was embraced by everyone,” she said.

Steve Antle of Fairview is one of the first people who agreed to an interview when I was reporting on the aftermath of the storm last year. He answered all my calls and texts and even offered to be my guide in the area, since so many places were inaccessible due to washed-out roads and bridges. Antle is part of what he calls the “ballooning” community, a close-knit and resourceful group of people who fly hot air balloons.

After Helene, Antle contacted his ballooning community for help, and they delivered everything from trucks filled with supplies (food, water, propane, gas) to campers for those who were displaced.

“When this happened, we were all trapped together. I kind of liken it to: we were all in an elevator that had stopped between floors, and nobody could get out, and nobody could get in,” Antle said. “So, everybody’s in the same boat. We’re all in the same misery. We’re all dealing with the same problems. And it just kind of coalesced into a group of battle-hardened people who were going to get through it.”

“Everybody really just pitched in together,” he said.

Sayles, Dietrich, Barnes Blanton, and Antle all expressed the same sentiment as they reflected on Helene a year later: their communities are stronger and closer now than they were before the devastation. While it is impossible to forget the hurt and unimaginable loss that Helene brought to these small locales in the Blue Ridge Mountains, focusing on the positive outcome of neighbors coming together—some for the first time—to help one another is a crucial part of the healing process.

Autumn will bring cooler temperatures, vibrant colors, and far fewer mosquitoes, ants, palmetto bugs, spiders, and so on. Well, good riddance to them.

But there is one bug I will miss: a creepy, monstrous thing I’ve come to love called the cicada.

Depending on the type (of which there are many), cicadas can spend as much as 16 years and a handful of months underground before they emerge and fly blindly around Earth until they die. Others have much shorter lifespans. Either way, we get them every year. Because they can’t see, when they are not in trees, they buzz aimlessly into doors and windows and trees. They’re about the size of hummingbirds, and they have shiny, metallic coloring complete with zombie-like, black or red eyes.

Two days ago, I stepped on a half-dead cicada while walking my dog. It omitted a shrieking sound akin to an angry cat. I think I jumped about three feet in the air.

Prior to this summer, I did not know they shed their shells, too. And they are not very polite about it. These things will park themselves on the exterior walls of our house, our fence, or our front steps and exit out of their adolescent, crispy, brown shells right there, leaving them like abandoned cars around our property. The legs of the shells stick to vertical surfaces, as if they are still alive and will crawl away any second. It feels apocalyptic.

The trade-off for their ugliness, however, is the comforting sound they make all summer, and in my opinion, it’s worth it.

Cicadas fill my summers with peaceful, white noise. I’ve always been one to find relief in the sounds of running dishwashers and dryers, air conditioners and fans—anything that makes the silence of our quiet neighborhood a little less stifling. Cicadas do the job, too, only their summer-long screaming from treetops is more than just noise. It is music. In mid-July, their thrumming is so loud, it makes your ears pulse. You might have to ask people standing right next to you to repeat themselves.

Cicadas are nostalgic, too. They are a reminder of past summers as much as they are a nudge to take in the present one. Their noise feels like the slow, lazy heat of a Southern afternoon in August. Other than maybe the chirping of robins and mockingbirds in spring, I can’t think of another natural sound as sentimental as the buzzing of cicadas.

As September 1 brings cooler temperatures to my region, I am reminded that summer will soon be buried underground with the cicadas until next year, and I will be queuing up some light jazz to ease my way into the silence of fall and winter.

Until next year, my noisy zombie friends.

I am an Irish-Catholic, Connecticut-born, boarding school- and private college-educated woman who worked remote for a national media company for years. When I moved from Boston to Washington, D.C., after college, I joked with friends that I was moving to “the Deep South.” Soon after the COVID-19 pandemic upended life in the nation’s capital, I took it even further and moved from D.C. to the Carolinas, along with a stampede of other Northerners seeking a change in weather, lifestyle, and home prices. When people ask where I’m from originally, there is always a caveat in my response: “Connecticut, BUT, my husband grew up here.” (You have to take bonus points where you can get ‘em.)

The South should hate me, but I’ve never felt more at home.

I’ve read several op-eds authored by Northerners who have lamented their COVID-era moves down South. Generally, they say they don’t feel the strong sense of community in their new Southern neighborhoods that they felt in their former Northern hometowns, or they don’t feel accepted. Among their reasoning: neighbors seem closed-off, non-religious families are at a disadvantage for making new friends, you have to drive to get anywhere, and family is far away.

While I don’t discount these grievances, there is a way to make the South your friend: embrace its strengths and forgive its flaws. Learn the history of your hometown and home state. Read literature authored by living and dead locals. Shop and eat local. Read local news. Buy produce at farmers markets. Take their brochures and read them. When people complain about the heat, say, “It’s the humidity.” Most importantly: talk to people.

In my former job as a reporter, I met local politicians, law enforcement officials, city workers, and everyday Americans for stories I covered across the South, the most impactful being the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Those I spoke with to cover Helene could have dismissed me or turned me down during one of the most devastating moments of their lives, but because I showed up in person and expressed interest, they didn’t.

A retired cop I reached out to on Facebook before making the trip to Asheville gave me a tour of his devastated hometown. When I couldn’t drive my car up an important roadway that was washed away by flooding and mudslides, a group of military volunteers gave me a ride to my destination—and back—in their ATVs. Countless locals showed me their destroyed homes and told me about their loved ones who perished and their property that was swept away by raging rivers and rainwater that slid off mountainsides, straight into communities. One flood survivor recounted the worst day of her life to me, and when I realized afterward that my phone didn’t record our conversation, she told it to me again. Volunteers offered me free meals that I could not accept.

Separately, while covering a murder case in rural South Carolina almost three years ago, I befriended another retired officer who was working briefly as my security guard and whom I still keep in touch with. When we talk on the phone, he calls me shoog (short for sugar) and tells me to be safe, no matter what I’m up to. He always asks me about my plans to start a family simply because the idea makes him happy. He tells me I’m going to be a great mom. What I did to deserve his kind commentary and well wishes, I couldn’t tell you.

What I do know is this: Southerners will embrace those who embrace them and treat them with respect. Maybe memory is failing me, as it often does, but I hardly remember learning about the South’s extensive history in school. What we did learn just barely skimmed the surface of its incredibly complicated and layered past. The South has a complicated present, too, tainted by deep-rooted poverty, poor public education, poor health standards, and an increasingly unattainable housing market (when my husband and I began house-hunting, we were told we’d need to give one arm and one leg each to find a place in our area and within our budget). But those who understand these issues and love the South anyway, for all its flaws, are those who thrive here.

And there is so much to love. To name a few items of the top of my head: the hum of cicadas in summer (the soundtrack of my backyard right now), oak trees, Spanish moss, biscuits, Southern literature, barbecue, afternoon thunderstorms, antique malls and flea markets, storybook-like gas stations, farms, Mardi Gras, magnolia trees, historic homes, Southern idioms, fried chicken, pie, southern Hospitality.

That last one is tricky, though. The South may have been known at one point for its emphasis on hospitality, but does that sentiment still exist today? Especially in big Southern cities full of transplants like me? That’s the question I want to answer with this Substack.

I want to believe Southern hospitality still exists. This past Sunday, in HomeGoods, I kept running into the same employee as I went on a wild goose chase for everything I suddenly realized I needed when I walked into the store with a plan to buy a desk lamp. She eventually just looked at me and said, “We should be best friends.” If that happened in Hartford, she would have said nothing and then reported me for stalking.

On the other hand, my husband and I are barely on a first-name basis with any of our neighbors, and it’s not because we haven’t tried. They just seem to want to mind their own business (can’t relate). Unsurprisingly, the nicest and most talkative neighbor on my street is from Ohio.

But I believe in this place, its people, its culture, and its demonstrated strength throughout American history. And I believe in the continuance of Southern hospitality. If such a cultural phenomenon still exists, I want to help keep it alive and well. If you have a story about Southern hospitality or know someone who exhibits the qualities that it entails, please comment or send me a DM!