On Being Not Southern But Missing the South

I am not a native-born Southerner. My parents were born and raised in Illinois, I was born in Maryland, but I spent all of the life I can remember growing up in the hinterlands of South Carolina. We lived pretty much every definition of a red neck joke that there is: grew up on a dirt road? Check. Truck rusting away in the backyard? Check. Chickens pecking around the yard? Check ... at least for a while, until they became stew. Learned how to use a bolt action rifle? OH check, that one was required learning at my junior high (seriously ... our final took us to a shooting range to shoot skeet). Yes,  yes, I grew up in the red part of the South.

But despite the fact that I can drawl with the best of them when the mood strikes me, I don't consider myself a Southerner, and I never really have. I can't trace my family tree to the Great War of Northern Aggression (to be honest, I don't think my entire family tree was in America yet). I never bothered to learn whether supper or dinner was actually lunch, because isn't that what lunch is for? And football, while I do enjoy watching the occasional game, well, I never felt the need to live, breath and die by the score board at either my local high school or Clemson or USC (that would be the University of South Carolina ... not the other one).

And yet I find myself a thousand miles away from the South and wishing I had deeper Southern roots. I don't know if it's the lack of kudzu draped power lines or the dearth of readily available sweet tea, but I feel adrift here in the great mid-West. When it comes up in conversation that I'm from South Carolina, I'm automatically classified as Southern. I feel as if I'm faking people out, as if I should wear a sign that reads, "Not a REAL Southerner," "Doesn't Really LIKE Grits" or "Never Cooked With Fatback."

What do you think? Should I have my own disclaimer?