Finding Oneself

Bailey White
My New BFF

I am going to ask author Bailey White if she would like to be my new best friend. She makes me laugh out loud and there would never be a dull moment in her company. Here, in Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living, she offers up this snippet of what happened when her cousin Lou Ann left her home in Georgia and moved to Santa Fe to 'find herself.' 

Then Lou Ann came back home for a visit. She was driving a Jeep Cherokee filled with huge, wild-looking dogs (three-fourths wolf, Lou Ann said); at least a ton of beautiful, multicolored rocks; dozens of crocus sacks full of strange-smelling herbs; and a big, slow-moving, silent man who was said to speak three dead languages fluently.

Lou Ann did seem happy - if placidity to the point of torpor can be called happiness. Her eyes saw things slowly, her once-nervous hands lay in her lap as still as cold lizards, and her frantically curly hair, which in her unhappy days had seemed to be yearning to leave her head to settle somewhere else for a life of its own, now lay on her shoulders as peaceful as drenched seaweed.

They came into the house trailing a wake of patchouli and sage and sat around eating macrobiotic rice while in the backyard the wolf-dogs neatly and systematically killed all our chickens. After a week they loaded the dogs and the rocks back into the Jeep Cherokee and drove off in a cloud of inner peace.

See what I mean? BFFs!