You're right. I lived for many years in the two biggest Texas cities -- but when I married a Kansas farmer, I married into a particular piece of earth and a particular community as well. My husband's gone now -- although still near, because buried in the heart of that same dear community -- but I am still a part of this piece of land and this community, and expect to be so until I die myself. This was something I never could have envisioned as a young person in the big city. Oh, I had inklings of it in the little Houston neighborhood I lived in for many years -- but until I became part of an agricultural community, I never knew it in my bones. I still don't know it completely, and probably never will, for it's way bigger and deeper and older than me -- but let's just say I can at least understand, in some small way, why people like Robert Lee and Alexander Stephens and the rest of them were more loyal to their home states than they were to the larger nation.