And that humidity, that humidity showed me that I'm never going to be able to leave Nashville. Not for any extended period of time.

I've lived other places. Visited other places. They're beautiful, and I want to travel more and see more of everything but I know that there can't be any place that's like here.

The hills, since my youth, the hills have circled me and kept me here in this bowl. Everywhere you turn there's a hill in the distance, green or blue depending on the distance, covered with trees and raising the horizon.

And then the smells come, after the sight, after the comfort of being held by the land. The honeysuckle or the jasmine or the pine or the magnolia. The smell that comes on the wind and as soon as the breeze changes, goes.

You've got the sight and the smell and then there's that heat that actually physically holds you. The heat that becomes a part of everything you do outside. The heat that's wet and moist and makes you sweat all the harder during the day and only barely goes away on those hottest nights when you're out on the hammock with some sweet tea and the honeysuckle.

And maybe I'm biased and naive, but it seems like you can't get that out of the south. You don't hear of that in the Dakotas or Washington. You don't hear of the nights with smells so rich that you don't have to eat because you're full on that.

And then, in the south, there's places that are as flat as the midland. You drive a few hours south of here and you're in Huntsville, the land of flatness. You drive a few miles east and ride up those hills and you're on the lip of the Cumberland Valley.

There are other dips in Tennessee, other hollers, other places surrounded by green or blue but the more you go east, the less the humidity dips. 30 or 40% difference. And the more you go west the closer you get to a whole other experience that's just as damn intoxicating. Memphis and Mississippi and the smells that come from some the best food on earth.

But it's not home.

And once you realize all this, all this stuff that's surrounding you here in the south you understand why and how so many brilliant writers came from here. If you can capture this, capture everything we all have in common down here, then there's no way that the world won't want to read you. It's a land that makes you drunk. It's an addiction. All of the south.

The clay dirt of Mississippi. The sand of lower Alabama.

The god damn heat.