I never realized how many things that surround us are truly “Southern things” until I went to work at the Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., in 1991.

That plant employed 7,000 people, and only 250 of us were from the South. All of a sudden, right smack in the middle of those Tennessee hills, we were outnumbered.

Everyday we either had to explain something or defend something that was as familiar to us as the sound of the wind in the pines, or the sight of cotton boles bursting in the fall.

What I don’t know about other parts of the country would fill a book, but I never realized that people from outside the South had never heard of making homemade ice cream.

One guy from Michigan looked puzzled when someone mentioned it. “Ice cream, like in a box?” he asked.

“No, like in a crank freezer,” we said.

 “What’s a crank freezer?” he asked.

So, one of the other guys went home and got his ice cream freezer at lunch, and I went to Food Lion and picked up the ingredients. The clerk knew right away what I was making.

“I know what you mean,” she said. “We get people in here all the time who don’t know what okra is, or broccoli slaw.”

So began my education in just how “Southern” Southern can be.

Later, we had a small country store. A couple with a Michigan tag pulled in and asked if we had peach soda. I knew enough not to direct them to the cleaning or baking aisle, and showed them the peach Nehis on the back shelf. They bought every single case we had, probably upwards of two dozen. “We can’t get these up North,” they explained. “We always stock up when we come through here.”

Now when I meet someone who “isn’t from around here,” it’s always a source of education to me what they find odd or strange about the South.

One dear friend in Cullman who comes from the great Northwest says that in addition to never having heard of broccoli slaw and okra, she never had the delightful concoction we call Strawberry Pretzel Salad, which I thought everyone made for the Fourth of July and Christmas.

She had never seen anyone put peanuts in a coke, or fry dill pickles.

I jokingly told her once that we love bacon so much because older Southern mothers crumbled it up in milk and fed it to us in our bottles. Her eyes got wide and she said, “Oh, really!” I was so tickled by her expression that I had to laugh.

Some of the guys at Saturn bought a slaughtered calf on halves. They came into work complaining about how the butcher had cheated them. “It just doesn’t look like enough to be a whole calf,” they kept saying.

You have to understand that we Southern folks, being vastly outnumbered, had heard this complaint and others about how the South was so inferior to other parts of the country, so we took this opportunity to get a little “payback.”

As they checked the different cuts of meat off their list, I asked innocently, “Did he give you your souse meat?”

“No, it’s not on the list! I knew this didn’t look like enough!” they said, racing to the phone to call the butcher.

We slipped out of the office and didn’t hear the response, but I’ll bet there is a butcher somewhere in Tennessee who is still telling the story of how some crazy guys called wanting the souse meat that he left out of their beef order.

There are a multitude of other Southern foods, customs and traditions that others have never heard of and don’t understand.

 Things like having Decoration Day, or homecomings and dinner-on-the-grounds at Southern churches. I thought Adam and Even started those traditions, but I guess not…

So, I explained how people lived miles and miles from each other back in the horse and wagon days. How I’d heard my Sunday school teacher talk about coming to church from deep in the Bankhead forest in the spring after heavy rains had made the dirt road almost impassable. “If we could get our wagon wheels in the ruts the previous wagon had made, we could make it down the mountain, but if one wheel ever got out of those ruts, we all had to get out, dressed in our Sunday best, and push the wagon back into the rut,” he recalled.

Those wagons were loaded down with good, homegrown food which farm wives had spent the whole day before cooking for those famous dinners-on-the-grounds.

Fried chicken, sweet potatoes, creamed corn, fried okra, biscuits and cornbread and chocolate or caramel cakes that would make your mouth water all during the service.

When church let out, women would spread everything on boards over two sawhorses and place their offerings out there so that everyone could sample them. They put colorful homemade quilts on the ground for people to sit and eat, tell tall tales and maybe catch a nap before the evening service. There was never any better eating, or socializing, anywhere.

They also brought watermelons, in season. My sweet Cullman friend once remarked that she had never seen so many watermelons on so many porches in her life. Bless her heart!

I know now what a privilege and an honor it is to have been raised here. The bumper sticker is right… American by birth — Southern by the Grace of God.