Southern Comfort

On the longest day of the year in the Piedmont of North Carolina, the weather is about as perfect as summer weather can be. 

Beef cattle graze on a pasture that straddles the Chatham/Alamance county line on a farm on unincorporated land loosely identified as Snow Camp but with a Liberty mailing address. 

The cows don't care. 

The scents of lilac and hay and cattle and horses warm the summer evening. Add old friends and chardonney and the night couldn't get any better. 

I was in North Carolina on assignment for an agriculture magazine, but I took some time to visit family on that Snow Camp farm. To visit new babies and congratulate a cousin on retirement

Peyton, who's German Shepherd ancestry outweighs whatever indiscretions were in her past, watches after darkness falls. She secures the perimeter each night. 

Earlier in the evening, Easton Ross, known as Little Ross to those of us who are irreverent because we think he should have been named after his grandfather, stacked blocks on Aunt Nelda's deck. Little Ross chatters up a storm, mostly about baseball. 

 Sheep, it goes without saying, are stupid. These are meat sheep, not wool sheep. They are probably crowded around the fence because a Border Collie or English Shepherd sent them there. The dogs are smarter than most Ivy Leaguers. 

All in all, it's as fine as it can be in North Carolina. I know the state gets a bad rap for its staunch redness, but I meet people with moderate political views and, mostly, we don't talk politics. We talk family and weather and farming. Will Simon get the big McCormack ready for the Fourth of July parade? Will Henrietta move back from Raleigh now that her stepfather is gone and the house is empty? Will Christie and Sylvia make it to Weekly Meeting now that they spend so much time at the lake? Important things. 

It's Southern Comfort all right.

It's home.