Back in the early 1970s, before chew toys and waste management were known to men of our somewhat rural hamlet, a 10-year-old couldn’t mow the grass without first scouting for deer legs and skulls that might otherwise become missiles capable of amputating his own stalks.

A taxidermist lived up the street, and he discarded all the carcasses in the piney woods behind his home, pieces of which found their way onto the…

A few ticks away from dusk, I quit fishing and began walking to the cabin alone. Barefoot, wearing only cutoff jeans, skin slick with mosquito repellent, I crossed the bridge over the creek, and then I remembered the catfish at the end of a stringer still poked in the riverbank.

I’d backtracked about 10 steps -- couldn’t leave my fish for the loggerheads -- when I looked down and saw a fat water moccasin slithering…

“No ’oblem,” said the twentysomething waitress, scooping up the plate of waffles smothered in rancid blueberries. She returned moments later, big sounds escaping her curiously almost-closed mouth: “Uh anager says e’ll ake em off uh ill.”

“What?” I asked.

“Thank you very much,” my wife smiled, seemingly oblivious to the girl’s impediment, while I fought wild urges to ask…

It's been called both the cradle of the Confederacy and the birthplace of the civil rights movement, where Jefferson Davis was sworn in and Martin Luther King Jr. sworn at; where Rosa Parks was just too goddamned tired to move to the back of the bus; and where George Wallace decreed ours a state segregated and proud.

Rush-hour traffic is manageable here, though residents have long forgotten the rules of approaching and…