A Highpointers’ Foundation mailbox register marks the spot, along with the USGS marker so enthroned.

My mother and I drove most of the length of Mississippi on our trip through the Deep South. Heading east from Cheaha Mountain, we stopped in the Helen Keller birthplace in Tuscumbia, Alabama, before crossing the state line and heading east toward Oxford. We took the Natchez Trace Parkway for much of that route, something I’d like to revisit if possible. There were cotton fields and small graveyards lined with Confederate flags.

In Oxford, we ate well and I visited the legendary, now numerous outposts of Square Books, which line the ring road around Lafayette County Courthouse. We also maid mandatory pilgrimages to Graceland and Rowan Oak, each built around the mythology of their respective former tenants. One man’s stashed bottle of Four Roses is another’s peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwich.

We circumambulated the Winterville mounds, dined along the Mississippi, and toured a hexagonal mansion in Natchez whose owners, part of the wealthy land-owning aristocracy of the region, were likely loyal to the North for economic motivations. We stayed in a beautiful B&B perched on a bluff overlooking the river.

And we saw Vicksburg, in all its Lost Cause absurdity, before a corrective visit to the Eudora Welty house museum, where the night-blooming cereus and cats are tended by the loving staff. The roses had faded but some daylilies remained and the trellises teemed with purple pods. There is so much to say about Mississippi, but I lost much of my original trip report with the collapse of the old website. It remains only in my the myths and memories of my head.