Soul in the South

I’ve been forced to address my soul in these tree-covered hills, this region of NASCAR and Civil War ghosts. Guitars, banjos and fiddles saddled to the wind. Mockingbird mornings. Moonshine sunsets. Do I miss Chicago, with all its steel beams and fragmented forest? Car horn mornings? Cell phone sunsets? Where I was constantly jabbed in the sides by strip malls and cars breathing down car’s necks? The patchwork wildness seemed okay at the time because it’s all I’d known. But now I live where it spreads out like a big whoosh against the horizon. So what’s more to say? The soul’s no longer jabbed.