LESSER DIVERSITIES

There are many variations of locales/scenery, customs/lifestyles, accents, foods, history and cultures in Georgia and Georgians. My recent winter hiatus from my current home in the Appalachian foothills to the coast reminded me of some of those contrasts.

The oddest and most puzzling among them I noted long ago. The beds on the coast always seem to be twice as high as the one’s upstate. Don’t ask me why because I haven’t a clue… there just seems to be an unwritten rule. Many of the coastal beds would be easier to get into if accompanied by an old fashioned two or three ladder steps similar to those sometimes seen in Libraries to reach the upper shelves… but rarely are they provided. The highest bed I’ve ever slept in was in S.C. at the old Anchorage, an antebellum mansion overlooking Beaufort Bay on Bay St. It was also the noisiest since it, a genuine antique, was stuffed with corn husks not, as a Hilton Head Island tour guide once erroneously told tourists, softer Spanish moss. If Spanish moss were used you’d be sorry because it is notoriously infested with red bugs.

Those high beds are also much easier to make-up come morning as they don’t require the make-upper to constantly bend over as you’re struggling with the linens. Of course that latter difference disappears if, as my grandson taught me after his year in a military boarding school, you make the bed up while still in it. He developed a very ingenious method of doing that which I, now in my later years, often use. An added skill neither advertised nor charged for by boarding schools, is that pupils in them must exercise and develop amazing levels of creativity in order to evade following the rules without actually breaking them… thus cleverly avoiding punishment.

Other notorious difference is the upstate attitude about building, land value and bookstores. On the coast they consider anything built above the ‘fall line’ to be viewed as disposable. Since I’m too wordy those are left for later blog(s).