Changes in latitude

"This is it, we really are rednecks," I thought. I was waiting in the car outside our small hometown's one liquor store with my little nephews as their mother, my heavily tatooed, dreadlocked sister, went inside to buy Everclear.

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I'd only spent five hours with my sister and nephews since my wedding two years ago. They came home to North Carolina from Vermont and hung out at the beach with Tweety and Pops last year, but their plans got messed up. My sister called me the night before they were supposed to come to Raleigh to spend two nights with me and told me that she really needed to get to the mountains and see the bloodwort while it was in bloom.

That's the way it is. Yeah, it hurt my feelings, but my sister is an herbalist. And plants are her life.

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So she flew down on Tuesday to drop off the boys at my parents' house to romp on the beach we grew up romping on for two sunny weeks. I took the week off from Wednesday on and went down to see my sister and my littles.

Jill and I, only having one afternoon to hang out, left the boys with my parents and went down to Calabash and Sunset Beach to scavenge thrift shops for the perfect, ridiculous dress for my White Trash Fourth of July party outfit. As we drove around, we slipped back into our native Brunswick County accents and slung effortless barbs at each other, laughing ourselves hoarse. Even though she lives in New England, she was more heartbroken than I was to hear the New York and Jersey accents at the stores we visited.

After shopping, we went to Sharky's, our old bar, on the Intracoastal Waterway at Ocean Isle. For the first time, the Jimmy Buffett songs playing on a loop made us happily nostalgic instead of irritated. We sat outside watching the boats go by, savoring the smell of salt water, motor oil and alligator mud, wishing, though never admitting, that we could come home again.

"Drink up," I said, "Mama's gonna call my cell phone any minute from now to tell us the boys are getting restless."

We finished our drinks and looked over at the beach. "Do you ever dream about it?," Jill asked me. "All the time," I replied. Right then, my mama called my cell phone...

Mimosa trees -- they look like Dr. Seuss trees with their pink, fluffy tufts -- grow wild all over the place down home. They apparently have a medicinal value and their bark is expensive, so Jill was hell bent on getting a cutting before she went back to Vermont. So she made me pull over at a construction site so she could get some. She took her sweet time getting it, and I sat in Judy Jetta watching the workers watching us, probably wondering who the weirdos were trespassing on their property as they dialed 9-1-1. "Get yer ass back in the car!," I yelled, hometown accent and vernacular firmly back in place.

We went back to our parents' house and had dinner at six. My daddy asked Jill how she planned to take the mimosa back to Vermont. She told him she would make a tincture. "How are you going to make a tincture without alcohol?" I stupidly asked. "The ABC store closes soon."

Jill begged us all to take her before it closed. We all told her that the locals would make fun of her for buying grain alcohol. She said, "But it's for medicine!" "That's what they're calling it now," Daddy and I joked at the same time.

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"You made some friends in there, I saw," I said to Jill when she finally came out and got back in the car.

"They made fun of me for buying 'the hard stuff', so I told them it was for medicine," Jill said. "Then they said, 'yeahhhh, medicine.'"