The Definition of B&B

My wife and I prefer spending the night away from home in the comfortable hospitality of hosted bed and breakfast establishments. B&Bs. Our range of experiences -- the stories we tell about what we've seen and heard and the stories our proprietors have shared with us -- would not fill up a book but enriches our lives all the same.

Earlier this week, when we stayed at a B&B in Black Mountain, NC, our host told us about a B&B his wife and he experienced near Mt. St. Helens (or was it Mt. Shasta?). Their host said she was tired of running a B&B so she offered them $5 off the price of their room and gave them a carton of "boxed juice" and a Twinkie for breakfast. In addition, there were critters (small insects and who knows what all else) crawling around their room at night.

Speaking of critters, my ancestors grew up in the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, carrying in their conversations the speech patterns and dialects of Western Europe, the British Isles and Ireland from the 1500s and 1600s.

Both sets of my grandparents used phrases like, "I reckon," "I'll get to that directly," "I'll carry you to the store," etc., that was often derided as common, low-country terms by my friends and schoolmates. So I learned to cultivate an accent that placed me somewhere in the American Midwest or the Washington, D.C./Maryland area. In my late teens and early 20s, people often commented they thought I was from Pennsylvania. I thought of it as my suburbanite accent and still do.

Now that I'm older, getting closer and closer to the half-century mark, I realize that I didn't grow up in the Midwest or any other place than upper east Tennessee. In fact, all of us grew up somewhere.

Should we embrace our place on this planet rather than allow our peers to drive out our inherited forms of speech, dress and general behavior? This question has no answer. It's like the definition of a B&B - what matters is the experience and how we want to enrich our lives.