They don’t let you take pictures inside the Eudora Welty House so I bought a postcard of one of the rooms. The house is lovely and you should move in immediately. I couldn’t get over the stacks and stacks of books (the tour guide said 9,000 books were found in her house) and what I really couldn’t get over was how it didn’t look that “Hoarder”-ish. I don’t know if it was the light from the generous windows or the lack of other knicknacks, but in there it made sense to stack books on the sofa, the dining room table, the countertops, and the bed, and wherever. They say this is how she lived. They also said she had a ton of friends and wrote a bizzzllion letters.
They give you a driving tour map if you are a good house tour participant – I took the road to see where she was born (and where, supposedly, Richard Ford grew up) there is a huge bronze statue of her in a courtyard near a bookstore and coffee shop. I stopped in to get a peek and felt obliged to order a coffee, the guy in the shop was kind enough to give me a short tour of the area, but when I asked him about her burial site he said he had never been there. I was a bit confused because it was right across the street – you could see Greenwood Cemetery from the quaint bookstore balcony, I know this for a fact because I had just spilled some coffee up there.
“Well I don’t go there. There’s packs of wild dogs and bums.”
“Packs of wild dogs?”
“Yeah – they are always running around.”
Yikes.
By the time I left the coffee shop I was so close to being dissuaded from my gravesite visit because I am deathly afraid of wild dogs and packs of them are just far too wild and people don’t visit cemeteries enough and if I was maimed my body parts would not be found for weeks if ever, and because my boyfriend has already made me feel like a creep for wanting to visit the gravesites of other dead people (I suppose they would have to be dead), but my curiosity got the best of me and the proximity of the cemetery was encouraging me… so I turned in.
I didn’t see any wild dogs and the only bum around was me and I suppose you could count some Europeans (who find it quite chic to tour in cemeteries by the way) wearing backpacks who were visiting another big grave. I didn’t think anything of it until I was wandering into the place – realized I was alone, it was windy, and I was standing on dead people, but I found her just in time. Buried across from a Magnolia and near a cedar. I bowed my head and whispered my short prayer I always offer to dead people I find interesting;“Way to go!” and I left.
Someone should really come and stack some books up on that plot.
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