I love the South, and I mean anywhere in the South, from the bayous of Louisiana to the Big Bend country of Texas, the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee to the palmetto marshes of Florida, the Arkansas Delta to the Gulf Coast beaches of Alabama, and from the glowing green grass of Kentucky to the outer banks of the Carolinas and Georgia.

However, like most Southerners, I am totally and irrevocably biased toward the soil of my own special birthplace. In my case, that special birthplace is the great state of Mississippi. The soil of my state is special to me. A pinch of Mississippi earth feels good when you rub it between your fingers. It looks good when it has just been plowed and its fertility reflects the morning sun. It tastes good to people who believe in its medicinal qualities, and it smells good when you pass it under your nose and inhale its richness.

My roots are anchored to that soil. It's where generations of my family are buried. It's where my wife is buried. And it's where someday I will rest beside them. It is my home.

When my son returned after being stationed two years in Korea as an Army helicopter pilot and my daughter returned after four years in Germany, also as an Army helicopter pilot, each of them used almost the same words I used sixty years ago when I returned home after a hitch in the Navy, "This is what I've been waiting for -- the unforgettable scent of home."

Not too long ago, my former college roommate drove to Mississippi from his home in California, a trip he makes every five years or so. "My wife and daughter are Californians," he said, "but Mississippi will always be my home. I have to be revitalized every few years. I have to smell honeysuckle and bream beds, cotton poison and, yes, even paper mills."

Is an aroma the quality that defines my state?

Without question it is.

How many times during my travels throughout the world have I suddenly stopped, inhaled deeply, and for a brief moment, smelled something that reminded me of home?

During a long visit my wife and I had with my daughter when she was stationed in Germany, she took us to dinner at a restaurant in Munich she claimed was the best in the city. The moment we stepped inside I stopped as suddenly as if I had walked into a brick wall. "I know you will think I'm crazy," I said, "but I smell catfish frying."

She laughed and pointed to a large banner stretched across the back wall. Painted in bold, black letters on a white background, and written in both English and German, were the words, "Mississippi Catfish Served Here."

A sense of smell is not all that triggers a memory of home for me. There are so many things about my home state that are beautiful, rich and good. Mississippi is also a beautiful melody of sounds, a smorgasbord of tastes, a picture montage of the hundreds of sights that make up the indefinable, intangible feeling we Southerners call our way of life.

It's the silvery domes of courthouses rising majestically into the clear, blue sky. It's an old-fashioned summer Sunday baptizing, a creek-side service combining perspiration and inspiration with shouts of "Amen" and dinner on the grounds.

Mississippi is centuries-old cypress trees, oaks that were old when the first French explorers set foot on our Gulf Coast soil, dogwoods blooming in white profusion, and redbuds providing a spurt of color against the gnarled, brown bark of long-leaf pines.

Mississippi is slow, lazy rivers, fast-moving streams and wild flowers as yellow and as fresh as newly churned butter. It's deer browsing in a Natchez Trace meadow; a string of bream; youngsters with worms and cane poles, and catfish too big for one man to handle; sandbars and sand dollars, swamps and snakes, and dust devils spinning out their brief lives on a freshly plowed field; and a mule circling to nowhere in order to put sweet molasses on the table as character for hot buttered biscuits.

Mississippi is farm workers with their rough, red hands and eyes to match, warming their hands by pot-bellied stoves in country stores, and sleek, fat cattle covering the hillsides that were once white with cotton and dotted with cotton pickers.

It's proud Indians living in communities named in the language of their ancestors -- Pachuta, Shuqualak, Itta Bena and Yakanookanee. And other people living in communities like Cracker's Neck, Hot Coffee, D'Lo and Black Hawk.

Mississippi is shrimp boats harvesting a crop for the nation's tables, and teenage girls sunning in bikinis one day and bowing gracefully in crinoline the next at an antebellum home during pilgrimage. It's Delta cotton rows stretching into infinity, and planters who drive 200 miles at night to a party and drive tractors for 12 hours through those same fields the next day.

Mississippi is a land made up of people who are more interested in a person's character than his financial statement, good neighbors who will fight at the drop of a hat for a good cause, people with a strong and earthy belief in God -- and that means little churches, big churches, country churches and city churches.

My state is politics fought with fervor like nowhere else in the world, college football as a way of life, a country road twisting into nowhere and an interstate stretching to everywhere, butterbeans and collard greens, cornbread and fried okra, jambalaya and crawfish boiling on the beach, and bustin' a watermelon under the branches of a magnolia tree.

Mississippi is music -- high school bands parading to a quick beat of a Sousa march, black soul reaching deep into the heart and conscience of man, country soul wailing the story of unfulfilled love, and the mournful sounds of "Amazing Grace" sung in sacred harp at a country church on a hot July day.

It's the stamina and strength, the power and glory of an old-time country preacher like my Smith County grandfather, raising his eyes and his Bible to the heavens and thanking God for the blessings he and his flock had enjoyed.

Yes, Mississippi has an aroma, a unique scent that once inhaled is never forgotten. But to me, Mississippi is its people -- good people, warm people who still believe in helping their friends and being good neighbors; people who were born in England, Germany, Kenya, or Mexico, but now proudly call themselves Mississippians and will dare you to refer to them by any other name; people who, more than any other factor, define what we call "our way of life."