Southern Hospitality

After a weekend of hosting three welcoming dinners/events for all the new kids in the Upper School where Carter’s goes I was looking forward to a little rest this morning before we began the back to school activities of the afternoon.  That plan was thrown out the window when Carter and I got finished last night at 9:30 and came home from the Jaymie, my welcoming co-hostess’ beautiful house out in the country to discover Russ’s incapacitation from throwing his back out.  We spent the morning getting Russ help with a doctor who came to the house since he is completely immobile.  Hopefully he will recover quickly with the help of some muscle relaxers.

After playing nurse Carter and I headed off to school for a lunch with her advisory.  It was the kids who will be together for the next four years and their parents meeting the teacher who is going to guide them through high school.  It was a great way to ease into school.  We then had a meeting with the head of the upper school so all the new kids could get their bearings and parents could get any last niggling questions answered.  No matter how much communication parents get some big concepts, like what time school starts and yes, you needed to have bought your books already seems to have gotten by some of them.  Thank goodness the first day is not so serious and everyone will survive any mistakes that happen.

We got to see many of the new to the school families we had just entertained over the weekend and more than a few mentioned how nice it was to see some faces they recognized and even a friend or two they felt they had made.  Being new to a school when you are a teenager is scary, but being new at Durham Academy we hope has been made easier.  In the car today Carter said, “I seriously don’t understand why the rest of the country isn’t southern.”  I asked what she meant by that and she said that the food, the hospitality and the weather all make the south great.  Then she went on to add “Yeah, and if you drive five minutes out of the city you are in the country with beautiful farms.”

I love that I have raised a Southern loving girl.  I think that hospitality to new people is so important.  She clearly gets that everything-is-better-with-food attitude from me.  And good weather puts everyone in a better mood.  I don’t think that the south is the only place these things happen, but that part about the city and the country being close together is true. I will say a place where a doctor will still make a house call and be really nice about it is one good place to be.  When I asked Carter what kind of southern food she wanted to dinner tonight she said, Mexican, Indian or Sushi.  I guess anyplace south of here is southern to her.