If you had asked me, when I was a very little girl, what my father did, I would have told you he was a shooter. He shot guns. As far as I was then concerned, that was by far the most impressive thing about him. When I was a bit older, I understood that he was a doctor; a few years later, it occurred to me to wonder why a person whose livelihood was putting things right would want to blast things apart. Not a terribly original thought in the seventies, as everyone my age was protesting guns and wars and wearing headbands across their foreheads. Anyway, my father’s guns have a great deal to do with my idea of Southern homes, as the first thing I heard about his Kentucky childhood was that he could lean out his window and shoot squirrels. As I said, this was impressive stuff: I was growing up in Connecticut, but it might as well have been Mars. My mother had grown up in Casablanca, Morocco, and was making sure we had a proper French upbringing. We certainly weren’t allowed to play with guns.

Hanging out the window and shooting. Home, for my father, was a small town in western Kentucky called Hopkinsville. It took only one visit for me to fall in love with my grandparents’ house. I learned to fish, and saw my first cow, in Kentucky. I used to pine for the house after we left, count the months until our return, and roam through the rooms in my daydreams. It was the house I longed to run away to whenever I got mad at my mother, my sisters, my piano teachers, my life. I wish I’d had the courage to go. Still, my father’s Kentucky home long ago came to represent everything I love (and believe in) about Southern homes—and I’ve spent countless days and nights in homes in New Orleans and Texas.

I should say, my father’s Kentucky homes. His parents had a small farmhouse on the outskirts of town as well as the house in town, but the two have blended together in my recollection. It doesn’t matter; they shared characteristics I’ve come to think of as classically Southern. They welcomed the out-of-doors; tree branches brushed windows (those poor squirrels!). The windows and doors were always screened and open, on the chance of catching a breeze, and the halls were designed to let air flow through; the architectural solutions to what we would now, in our climate-controlled days, call a green life had already been developed. The openness of the house in town also had to do with the people constantly going in and out—friends, relatives, neighbors; there seemed to be a busy, social quality to life in that house. Everyone was Sugar, or Darlin’, or Honey, or, my favorite, Dear Heart. There was always someone rocking on a deep porch, and wide hallways gave on to staircases that led to upper floors—that, too, was alien to me, and mysterious, as we had always lived in one-story apartments and houses. The house was old and held a family’s history in its rooms, which also, to my young mind, seemed key to a Southern home; Northern homes were new, and you had to invent a story for them.

The house neatly divided into rooms that were for work (cooking, sewing) and rooms in which one had to maintain proper decorum and sit primly, with hands folded, on horsehair sofas. I was allowed to take my books into the parlor and felt quite privileged about it. One day, when I was about five, I offered to read a story to my cousin, who was ten years older than I. She sat and listened quietly while I chatted and turned pages—and it wasn’t until thirty years later that she confessed she hadn’t been able to understand a word I was saying most of the time, as I had made up some language that mixed French and English, with a Northern accent to make things worse. How gentle and polite she had been, how courteous—everyone was. The air of sweet graciousness that imbued every room in that house was something else that I came to associate with a Southern home, a quality of warm, reliable hospitality and pleasant manners. None of my feeling for what makes a Southern house has much to do with architectural expression, or curtains, or rugs, or furniture—none of which I can remember, except for a certain darkness of wood. It’s a spirit I recall so tenderly, a permeating system of values.