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Um, "tea line", Shannon...
Who calls it that, some Yankee?

Being from the small town south, I've never heard of the term "tea line" but it definitely fits.

Might need to change it to "sweet tea line" to avoid any confusion however.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_tea

The "Sweet Tea Line!" That's spectacular!

Fantastic! I can't believe this is on AT. I was born in Alabama (though raised in the North) and have a few close friends in NYC from the deep South. We've been joking lately about how nobody up here "gets" sweet tea. (You MUST disolve the surgar in the HOT tea, people! Enough so you can actually feel your teeth rotting when you sip it.
Two friends of mine with a place upstate and serve sweet tea by the gallon. There's nothing that says "home" quite like it.

Whoops. Extraneous "(" and "and"

I must agree that while I have not heard the "tea line" before I think it is a perfect name. As far as restaurants go, I believe the demarkation along 95 is Fredericksburg, VA (I grew up 25 miles north of F'burg, owned a home in F'burg and went to college some 75 miles south of F'burg).

Regardless, the name is perfect and I have actually had someone from New Jersey ask me, "So what is sweet tea anyway?". WHAT?! (Although that is preferable to the people that think it's just iced tea with sugar)

It was learning that the sugar has to dissolve in hot tea that was the revelation for me. It's a completely different experience from drinking iced tea that's had sugar dumped in it (which I can't stand)... and on a sweltering hot day in North Carolina, with some pulled pig on a bun, daaaaammmmn, that sweet tea is good.

This just seemed to fit today. I love this woman's columns - from the Myrtle Beach newspaper.

"When Bubbas and hoes are extra welcome"
CELIA RIVENBARK
FROM THE BELLE TOWER
There are moments when you realize that, despite all the talk of blended populations and such, we Southerners are still different from the rest of the world. And not just because the people who work at Chick-fil-A always tell you to "have a blessed day." I'm not sure why we're different. Maybe it's because we live in perpetual fear of monster hurricanes and unsweet tea, both plenty scary in their own way.

If you don't believe me, consider this. Last week, I was visiting a new friend who moved here from the North. She lives in a lovely subdivision filled with dozens of folks who have moved from Long Island, which has a completely different approach to iced tea, by the way.

We were saying goodbye on her front porch when I spied a 4-foot-long snake slithering its way toward my Taurus (incidentally, the car recently named "statistically least likely to be stolen," which somehow leaves me feeling insulted). I screamed, and to her credit, my new Northern pal screamed, too.

"Snake!" she shrieked.

"Snake!" I shrieked.

"Get the hoe!" I shrieked.

"Huh?" she said.

Fortunately for us, at this moment, my pal's husband and a neighbor, also from the North, walked into the yard at just the right moment. The garage door was up, and I could see an array of Snake Killing Implements hanging neatly on the pegboard.

"Get a hoe!" I shouted to the men. "There's a snake!"

They looked perplexed.

"A hoe?" said the neighbor, who was wearing some kind of jumpsuit with what looked just like the Dharma Initiative logo from "Lost" on the pocket. Funny the stuff you notice when your adrenaline is pumping.

The neighbor and my friend's husband looked at me as if I had asked them to help me strangle a basket of kittens.

"Oh, he's not a threat," Dharma guy said. "Snakes actually protect us from other harmful pests."

I could've sworn I saw the snake pause to laugh at this, while sidling up to my wheel well.

"GET A HOE!" I repeated, thinking that at least my friend's hubby would take this seriously.

But he'd also become Johnny Environment, and the snake was just outright guffawing at this point.

And then it hit me. I needed a Bubba. My whole life, Southern men have come to my rescue, but this was not something that translated geographically. Where I'm from, if a woman hollers "Snake!" at least four Bubbas will magically appear, hoes in hand, and you're looking at snake puddin' in under 10 seconds.

The snake, hearing all this, slithered away to romp some more in his happy Bubba-free neighborhood.

"Fuhgeddaboutit," I heard him hiss.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact CELIA RIVENBARK at celiariven@aol.com or go to www.celiarivenbark.com.

Our apologies Windwolf/Celia, for our knucklehead men. Some of us north of Baltimore do know what hoes are for, btw; these guys really were L.I. princes, apparently.

Next time just tell them a lawyer is slithering towards them, and watch them find a hoe *then.*

i knew i was back down south (Kentucky) when my Grandad died last year and the undertaker's brother delivered a smoked pork shoulder to the house, as he does for every family.

Oh...I love sweet tea!

I was born, raised, and still live in New Jersey, but spent many summers in North Carolina, drinking sweet tea and eating barbecue....that is another thing that people outside of the south don't understand---barbecue is not a sauce, or some meat with barbecue sauce added to it. You can't explain it to them, you just have to feed it to them.

By the way, Arizona makes a Sweet tea version of their Iced Tea (complete with a picture of a genteel plantation on the can). It actually tastes pretty good.

Eh, most snakes you see are harmless garter snakes. No point in chopping them up, but maybe I am a true Northerner now. However, I used to go to camp in NC, and was forced to coexist with water moccasins and copperheads. I would chop those up, but I know they can kill me.

Nice Place there.. Getting close to home for me too.

well, tea is sweet up north in Canada too! I had no idea it was sweet down south - further south - because we were always disappointed with the bitter non-sweet iced tea. there are great recipes for iced tea involving sugar or honey. for example, 1 mint tea bag + 1 green tea bag in a big mug with just boiled water, and steep the crap out of it until that mug of tea looks like coffee, then dissolve a few spoonfuls of sugar or honey, then pour into a big jug (we've used the big gallon milk jug) and dilute with cold water, then stick it in the fridge. AMAZING!
oh - and then maybe we should re-define the tea line as the un-sweet tea belt? cause we are real sweet up here, north of the border...

Doug in DC is right. There's a good reason why the Virginia Welcome Center is located way down deep into geographically-defined Virginia at Exit 130 in Fredericksburg. : )

Barbeque is a meat product; a cookout is an event. The sugar for Sweet tea must be added while the water's still hot. Jamestown was founded before Plymouth. Don't go lookin' for your Chick-fil-A on a Sunday. Always send a thank-you note, and never return a dish empty.

ach, this thread is making me hungry.

maybe we Louisianians are just wild folk in comparison to those civilized ladies and gentlemen up in Myrtle Beach, but we generally let the snakes live, too, unless they were water mocassins or cottonmouths. and even then, i remember way more warnings of 'stay away from that pond, it's fulla water moccasins' than 'hey, let's get some garden implements and go hack apart the water moccasins that live by the pond'.

the funny thing about being a southern girl living with a London boy is that even though he drinks tea like it's going out of style, he won't touch Sweet Tea with a ten foot pole. if i can get my hands on some Liptons sometime soon i think i'm going to try to make sweet tea sorbet.

Ha, opoponax! No, I wouldn't hack up even a poisonous snake just for the heck of it. A baby copperhead got into our bunk and was hacked, but that's the only episode I remember like that.

Though I was always convinced that a water moccasin was lurking in our murky swimming spring...

You can't find good sweet tea everywhere in the south. Sometimes it hard in the Atlanta area. I know I've gotten unsweet tea a couple of times when I ordered sweet. I don't think many people around realize that putting sugar in unsweet tea doesn't make the tea sweet. Around here, food/drinks get less and less southern. I guess that's the negative effect of having lots of transplants.