…and we’d both grown up on O’ahu.
It was 1968, and after a few years on the Mainland in California, I was glad to be back where life made sense to me. I was never going to return to a place of riots and political assassinations, as I saw the Mainland. Life after marriage took my friend back to the South, and while she and her husband worked as civil servants in DC, her parents and brothers returned to their roots in Texas. I did not even realize Washington, DC is a Southern city. I feel abashed by my youthful ignorance of the actual diversity of white American culture — I’m white, and as a Californian since 1979 and a Kama’aina before that, I came to realize I’ve experienced only a slice.
My friend has shown by her choices what it is to love that region, and to feel her own deep roots. Wherever she and her husband have bought property over the past 50 years, it has always been in the South. Racially prejudiced? No — not and be a friend of mine. Political? Well, I think she learned to keep all her political opinions on the down-low while working in civil service for political appointees all those decades. After 9-11 she and her husband (a dark Middle Easterner with an obvious name) experienced many difficulties at work and among other people, enough that they and their extended family ended up changing their last name to something less identifiable — still theirs by right, just not something the average neighbor would glom onto.
Sorry for rambling on— just to say, I’m glad you found your place to be, and that you still have loving memories — and that, I am still learning. 
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