I don’t mean to intrude in this story I’ve been telling with such objectivity that there is no room for myself, but I can’t help remarking on the fact that this house where I live, this porch where I often sit, these steps which I daily climb, was the setting for the first meeting of Gran with her daughter, my mother, or at least the first since Mom as a baby had been stolen away from Gran. This is the same porch where my brother Vernon announced that he intended to run for governor, the same porch where my mother first laid eyes on my father, and the same porch where Gran first laid eyes on Gramps after seventeen years, which is about to happen soon. I plan to go on living in this house the rest of my days—where Gran had her post office boxes and showcases is now where I have my living room furniture—but after I’m gone somebody ought to put up a bronze plaque declaring this humble house-that-was-once-a-store-and-post-office a historic monument.Latha, as I’ve chosen to call Gran for the sake of the story, could not let her visitors leave, and it was not merely a matter of the polite Ozark exchange of invitations and counter-invitations reflected in the name of the town itself, “Stay More,”
