Tooling to Tula

When I was a child, my father liked to take us on imaginary trips.  “We’ll get up in the morning,” he’d begin, then describe in detail our whole day, from where we’d stop for breakfast to where we’d spend the night.  

My father loved to travel but never had the opportunity to do much of it.  These imaginary trips may have been some consolation for him, and they instilled in me at an early age a love for travel.  That may be the reason I still love a road trip.

My husband and I travel frequently now, and because we have a family member who works for an airline, we usually fly.  That, too, can be exciting.  But when we booked a cruise out of New Orleans recently, I suggested we drive to New Orleans from our home in Tennessee even though we could have flown for free.  We planned to visit Oxford, Mississippi on our way there.

Both of us had been English majors in college; my husband had taught English for about forty years, and had completed a dissertation on William Faulkner;  both of us have been life-long readers.  So Oxford, Faulkner’s home, was a logical stop for us.

Besides Faulkner, Oxford has been the home of several other renowned writers, among them one of my favorite writers, Larry Brown.  

Brown is best known for his novels and short stories, but he also wrote a couple of acclaimed non-fiction books.  One of them is called Billy Ray’s Farm.  It is a collection of essays, one of which is about his son Billy Ray’s attempts to begin farming on the family farm near Tula, Mississippi which is just outside of Oxford.

So I loaded a recent biography of Brown and Billy Ray’s Farm on to my Kindle and off we went.

We planned to visit New Orleans and the Western Caribbean, but I suspected that Tula, Mississippi might be the highlight of my trip.