The single best compliment I can pay to a fellow writer is boy did you inspire me to pen something similar. I am a Southerner by birth, a Northerner by upbringing and training, and the dichotomy posed by this is part of what makes returning the vernacular of my Deep Southern upbringing so painful. The 'taints and mash the button and carry you to the sto' are all part of how I spoke as a child, even as my lettered Northern parents corrected my colloquialisms when I returned home. There is something terribly sweet and sad about this, that sense of disconnect with what formed us combined with the deep need to be acceptable to those people whose influences shaped us. I am not acceptable to the South, yet I still love the redwing blackbirds, chuck wills' widows and all the night sounds after a heavy rain. I cannot sleep without a night symphony. The woods of my youth are long gone, but my love of what made parts of my youth magical is not. You brought that back. This piece is picture-perfect. Sad, evocative, honest, beautiful, and in the way of the best of all writing, makes me want to write better. Bravo. This is the kind of writing which is why I joined Medium.