Books on the piano, books on chairs and sofas, books on the dining room table, every shelf overflowing with books. A myriad of them greets visitors to the home of Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer prize winner who came home to write. Her house and garden were her sanctuary, her refuge where she always returned after a bustling trip to meet people, accept awards, or charm another audience.
Yesterday I returned to Eudora Welty’s Tudor style home on a shaded street of vintage houses in Jackson, Mississippi. When I was there five years ago with Kathy James and Rebecca Godwin, plans were underway to open the house to the public, but the yard and the garden were all we could enter.
Since then the house next door has been purchased and turned into the Eudora Welty welcome and visitors’ center with an introductory film and displays of her many awards, keepsakes, correspondence with friends, and lots of pictures. Both Lorna Schmidt and I could have spent ages taking in everything in the visitors’ center, but we were politely informed that it was time for our tour of the house. We had to go back later to see all the fascinating material in the center.
Two well-informed and very enthusiastic docents led us through Eudora’s house, exactly as she left it with all her books, furniture, art, and papers intact. Her plain white walls and tall windows with shades and filmy curtains, her collection of paintings and mementoes from family and friends, her kitchen with not a modern convenience in sight told us that she was a woman who cherished simple things like a note from a friend.
On the dining room table were several typewritten pages edited in her handwriting with strikeouts and arrows, words written in. It was easy to see that she was a writer like the rest of us, changing a first draft again and again. A sample of her writing, with paragraphs cut apart, rearranged, and stapled together to improve the flow, was there to see. I remembered when I used the same old, cut-and-paste method before I became a strict computer writer.
When we visited the garden behind the house, I found that the far back had been cleared of brush and bamboo, and a replica of the playhouse Eudora’s brother built had been placed there where she enjoyed so many quiet times among the plants she tended and included in her stories.
The one thing I missed from my previous visit was a row of bright orange-red flowers beside the garden house. When I asked about them, I was told they’d been dug to separate and replant. Then, gardener that I am, I was delighted to receive a bag of montbretia corms from the garden of Eudora Welty to plant in my own garden.
Yesterday I returned to Eudora Welty’s Tudor style home on a shaded street of vintage houses in Jackson, Mississippi. When I was there five years ago with Kathy James and Rebecca Godwin, plans were underway to open the house to the public, but the yard and the garden were all we could enter.
Since then the house next door has been purchased and turned into the Eudora Welty welcome and visitors’ center with an introductory film and displays of her many awards, keepsakes, correspondence with friends, and lots of pictures. Both Lorna Schmidt and I could have spent ages taking in everything in the visitors’ center, but we were politely informed that it was time for our tour of the house. We had to go back later to see all the fascinating material in the center.
Two well-informed and very enthusiastic docents led us through Eudora’s house, exactly as she left it with all her books, furniture, art, and papers intact. Her plain white walls and tall windows with shades and filmy curtains, her collection of paintings and mementoes from family and friends, her kitchen with not a modern convenience in sight told us that she was a woman who cherished simple things like a note from a friend.
On the dining room table were several typewritten pages edited in her handwriting with strikeouts and arrows, words written in. It was easy to see that she was a writer like the rest of us, changing a first draft again and again. A sample of her writing, with paragraphs cut apart, rearranged, and stapled together to improve the flow, was there to see. I remembered when I used the same old, cut-and-paste method before I became a strict computer writer.
When we visited the garden behind the house, I found that the far back had been cleared of brush and bamboo, and a replica of the playhouse Eudora’s brother built had been placed there where she enjoyed so many quiet times among the plants she tended and included in her stories.
The one thing I missed from my previous visit was a row of bright orange-red flowers beside the garden house. When I asked about them, I was told they’d been dug to separate and replant. Then, gardener that I am, I was delighted to receive a bag of montbretia corms from the garden of Eudora Welty to plant in my own garden.
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