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SAVANNAH: The word itself is a musical sound that rolls off the tongue like a song of the south. Though it is a common noun meaning tropical or subtropical grassland with trees in Georgia of the southeastern US it has been translated to a proper noun. There Savannah is a special place. Oglethorpe, the general from Godalming in England who founded and designed the city, preserved those trees as the centerpiece of his design. He set up thirteen squares, small circular parks, with the delicate moss draped evergreen and majestic oaks as a refuge for the town's dwellers.
Any time of the year you see the small city it has become... those squares, often referred to as Savannah's jewels, make you appreciate his foresight. The passage of years since, has seen an overlay to that reverence for green spaces like the transparency of mica flakes, tightly adhering but separate and distinct. Grander avenues, like the one bearing his name, with those same moss draped oaks in their median, were added. A larger acre was added to become Colonial park, now completely a cemetery, but at one time also a park in the growing settlement. There active youngsters played alongside the resting remains of the founders' graves. The ultimate city park came a century later but continued the theme of graceful greenery, architectural embellishments and serenity. It is named Forsyth and covers acres to mark what was at a later time the city's center.
Its complex culture is also made up of tightly adhering, separate yet distinctly layered transparent flakes. It bears the marks of its once British origins tempered with incoming Africans, Southerners, Sharecroppers, Irish and other Immigrants, Carpetbaggers, Industrialists, Tourists and Retirees searching for unity... Americans. Such diversity has yielded equally complex forms of music, literature, dance and other arts that give it a distinctly recognizable flavor.
Lady Astor described Savannah as a beautiful lady with a dirty face. More recently magazines have described her as the most beautiful city.
Savannah Spell and it's sequel(s) showcase the earliest of Savannah's diverse moodiness. Moodiness variously and selectively described as seductive, sweltering, serene, stormy, saccharine, sluttish, sophisticated, strange, stoic, stylish, stifling, stigmatized, stagnant, squalid, spoilt, spiteful, spirited, spiritual, spellbinding, slovenly, snobbish, slanderous, shocking, sheepish, sensitive, selfish, seething, secretive, seedy, screwy, scary, scheming, sanguine, sardonic, scornful, salacious, sadistic, sacrilegious and sacrosanct, depending on the time and person asked.