Here, at the first roast of the season, I stand, holding my knife, my glove ready. Dan and Michael carry a metal bin full of steaming oysters between them, gripping the handles. They tip the bin, and the oysters spill out on the table with a clunk. People gather around, jostling for position. The usual jokes. The usual laughter. I'm ignoring them. I take a swig of beer as I try to be polite and let others make a small pile in front of their position. It's the southern way. That politeness. But then I get my hands on mine and start my own pile.

I grip the biggest one, its small ridges crumbling a little in my glove. I put the tip of the knife in the joint in the back, and I wiggle. Nothing. Not a thing. I push harder. Then, with a crack, it opens. Juice spills down my arms, soaking my shirt sleeves. I smell like fish, brine, pluff mud. I pull the oyster from the shell, fat and juicy, and dip it in the cocktail sauce, thick with horseradish. It tastes of the sea and suntan lotion and sand and all that winter is not. I am loving for the first time in my life the months with an "r" in them.

Of course, I had eaten raw oysters before, dainty halves in their sterile ice trays. But not like this. Not steaming hot from the grill, spread thick on a plywood table where I stand opening them myself. Not pulled from the shell thick and firm and washed down with cold beer and loud music. Not hands full of mud and arms covered with juice and feet tired from standing.

My fellow liberals from other parts of the country sometimes ask me, quietly, as if there is some shame in it, "Why do you stay in South Carolina?" If they could come to an oyster roast with me, they might see why.