A new online magazine called, “Raised Country” asked me to write a story about my youth in Alabama. They’ve published it as
“The Country” means a hundred different things to a hundred different people. To me, it has always meant freedom. There’s something about the lack of people and the open space that gives you an opportunity to stretch out and have an adventure.
As a teenager that meant the ability to get into trouble without having someone on your back. Blow something up. Build a potato gun and shoot it at cars that whizzed by on Hwy 36. Build a tree house in the woods and use it as a base of operations for pine cone battles, runs to the bootlegger, or a place to stash our Playboy or OUI Magazines (which we pronounced as “O-U-I”, having no idea that it was French).
The country meant that in the summer you said goodbye to your mom at 7am and you got home when the streetlights came on. What you did in the intervening 13 hours was between you, your little brother, and whatever gang of boys you were running with that day. You were 12-years-old. You solved your own problems. You made your own fun.
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