Roots

Read this post by Jim Burroway. It's wonderful.

I didn't grow up in Appalachia, although I have strong connections there -- my mother's side of the family is all over the place in McDowell and Buncombe counties in North Carolina. We used to visit my grandmother for fairly lengthy stays when I was small -- sometimes almost the entire summer. And this was an old farmhouse in the hills, with no electricity, a fireplace and wood stove for heat, and running water in a cistern in the front yard, piped in from a spring up the hill. My joke used to be that of course my grandmother had running water -- if she needed water, one of us ran out the yard and got it.

And it could take me up to a month to lose the hillbilly accent when I got back home to the Midwest.