Ethyl's observations on growing up in rural MS.

Rural Tishomingo County, MS is like no other place on earth. We even have our own version of the English language. For instance, we are never getting ready to do something, we are always fixing to do it. We never cook turnip greens, we cook turnip salat. It never looks like it's going to thunderstorm, it's coming up a cloud. In the summer we cook rosin-nears (roasting ears) and eat tater salat. When we pick vegetables from our gardens and we have enough to feed our families, we always say we have a mess, as in a mess of greens, a mess of peas, a mess of squash. Anyone who moves into the area and is not native born, then they are from 'off'.
In the summer in the fifties and sixties a great many of the roads in Tishomingo County were either gravel or dirt. When the summertime thunderstorms came down hard and heavy, so much of that dirt turned to mud, and it was extremely easy to either slide off the road or to get miserably stuck up to your axles. But never you worry. If this happened to you all you needed to do was just sit back and wait patiently. In a half hour or so some good old country boy would be bound to come along on his tractor or big  truck with a heavy logging chain and pull you out. It did no good to try to pay them. They were always more than happy to oblige. In fact, they lived for that stuff. There was just something so therapeutic about dislodging any kind of vehicle from the Mississippi mud.