Then six weeks went by. I had lost my home and my budding profession as a newspaper columnist but I had found a friend and a new life so rich and spoiled and pampered and charming that I never shed another tear for the small town of Franklin, Kentucky, and its sensible midwestern inhabitants. My mother and father had turned their house into a party. My mother’s cousins came up from the Delta and my father’s cousins came in from their plantations near Aberdeen to eat and play bridge and sit on the porch discussing whether we should have dropped the atom bomb and if insurance was worth having and how soon it would be before the niggers took us over. Every afternoon by five o’clock they would gather on the screened-in porches while Mother ran in and out carrying whiskey sours and scotch mists and gin and tonics. Around the corner my brother Dudley and his wife were settling down into the red brick house Daddy had bought for them. Across the street his cousin Martha Ann held her own court and next door to that was another Victorian mansion Daddy was fixing to buy for his brother. Anywhere I moved, anything I touched belonged to him. Anything I wanted I could have. All I had to do was stay on my diet and be “nice to people“ and get acquainted with north Alabama. Charles William and Irise were my guides. They took me all over Dunleith and the outlying countryside. They took me to meet the famous Mimi Huffington who painted portraits of anyone who caught her fancy and sometimes even painted them for money. She had a Greek column in her living room and a bedroom she had turned into an artist’s studio. She was first cousin to the fabled Lizzie who hated me for living in her house. Finally I was even taken to meet Lizzie. “Come see what we did,” I volunteered. “Come over anytime you like.”

“I didn’t want to move,” she answered. “I can’t even drive by the place.” She squinted up her freckled face.

“If you change your mind, call me up,” I answered. “I didn’t want to move either. I didn’t want your house.”