Last night we had what is a quite rare occurrence for our area of Utah- a thunderstorm, complete with some amazing lightening. After a particularly loud boom, Olivia came running out of her room calling for me:
Mommy, that loud noise woke me up!
It was just thunder, sweetie.
Oh, thunder! That comes with rain.
Yes, it is raining outside right now.
Well, I hate that thunder. Can I sleep with you?
Our Louisiana boys, the oldest 3, didn’t wake up at all during the storm. Even though they were still very young when we moved to Utah, perhaps they subconsciously remember thunderstorms, which were a very frequent occurrence in Louisiana. Sawyer, also, didn’t wake up during the storm but that doesn’t surprise me. Sawyer is the world’s greatest sleeper, thank goodness.
Olivia is a Utah girl, all right. There’s the not being lulled to sleep by a wonderful thunderstorm thing, something I loved about Louisiana. Also, she says “fir” instead of “for.” When I was a little girl in California and we would either visit my Utah cousins or they would visit us, I thought that we talked basically the same way except for a few things. They said “fir” and they called soda “pop.” So to me, that is the Utah accent. Now that we live here, there are a few more words that I have noticed (for example, “moun-in” for mountain). But I love it. And I am apparently becoming a Utah girl myself as sometimes I catch myself saying “fir.”
My first taste of a southern accent came when my uncle Pat married a Texan. I loved the way my aunt Cathy talked. When her family came out for their wedding in California, her niece who was my age came over to play with me. I thought I’d make her feel right at home so when we were introduced I said, “Hey, ya’ll! Ya’ll want to play with ma Bar-beees?” I truly wasn’t mocking her. I loved her southern accent and wanted one of my own.
Be careful what you wish for. A few years later my dad was relocated to Mississippi with Lockheed. I, who had perfected the art of being a teacher’s pet, got in trouble on my very first day of school in my very first class. My English teacher asked me a question. What came out of her mouth sounded to me like a foreign language and I had not a clue what she said. So I responded, “What?” This was a perfectly acceptable thing to ask of a teacher in laid-back California. Not so in strict Mississippi, where paddling was still an acceptable form of punishment in school. My teacher said, “I don’t know how you are allowed to speak to your teachers in California but here you will say, ‘Excuse me, MA’AM?!’” I might not have understood every word of what she just told me, but I sure got the gist and “ma’am” and “sir” immediately became a part of my vocabulary. Other things took a while longer to get down, like calling soda “coke” instead. I got laughed at many a time for asking for a “soda.” Guess it was retribution for thinking my cousins were silly asking for a “pop.”
I appreciate the variety of accents we have in the U.S. I love being able to guess where a person is from by their accent or vernacular. My own son sounds like he is from Brooklyn! It’s funny, too, because every time we ask Cameron where he wants to go on vacation he says, “New Yawk City!” Guess he feels a certain affinity for the place which he has never been to but certainly sounds like it’s where he was raised.
So I suppose in our home, our accents are a nice mish-mash of California-Louisiana-Mississippi-Belgium-Utah-New York?
