Home Grown

Everything has an ending point, and this was ours for Tennessee. We were packed up and ready to go. We hadn't had a proper shower or even any resemblance of a breakfast, but we were running late as usual.We were hoping to make it to Tupelo by nightfall. Mississippi bound!

"Shawna, show me your excited to leave Tennessee face!" Knowing I wouldn't stop until she did, she flashed a quick yet fake smile and promptly turned her back to finish packing up the goods. Notice we aren't even parked properly in the few spaces that are left. Yeeeaaahhhh... don't care.

On our way back to SD at the end of the TN tour, Shawna was awesome enough to let me take a trip through my old stomping grounds. Wait, can it be called "stomping grounds" if I was too young to be doing any kind of 'stomping?' This is what we found the next day.

 

 Wait a minute...

Shawna was driving and obviously was trying to pull a quick one. Guess we all know what she really thinks now, huh?

 So we went past my old house... or should I say, 'where my old house used to be.' How sad!! So I walked around the lot, telling Shawna where each and every thing that I could remember was.... "Here was where the pool was, the trampoline, the knotty oak tree we used to climb, the treehouse my dad built... etc." Until finally I got quiet, standing in the middle of the lot. A solitary tear welled up in my eye: I spouted off some crybaby line like, "THIS is all that is left of my childhood memories??!!" Yeah, yeah  How sad for me, I know...

 The only thing alive left standing, and I don't even remember the tree. Dang it!

 The neighbor across the street pulled in while I was snooping around. I decided to go ask him if he knew what happened to the house. He did, in fact, because his mother had lived across the street since before we had even moved in! He said that it went through a few different owners since we left back in 1992 and finally ended up in the grubby little hands of a not-so-nice couple. The couple would fight and yell and bicker all the time, until one day the guy had finally had enough. He set the house on fire to get her out of it!!! Oh, my, goodness... what is the matter with people?! Anyways, Paul (the neighbor) said there were probably drugs involved and the plot had stayed vacant and untouched ever since.

 Right down the road was Elvis Presley's birthplace. Literally, this is the house he was born and raised in. There is a huge memorial and you can even take a tour of the one bedroom house. He and his parents lived here until he was 16 when they moved a short ways away to Memphis so he could become a star. I remembered this exactly from when I was a child... led us right there from memory even! Of course, they have added on and made it just a little more touristy since then.

 Nice to meet you, Mr Young Presely.

 Elvis at 13, showing Shawna how to act like a star.

 Take tips Shawna, you'll be a guitar hero in no time!

 This is the most rediculous thing I have seen all year...

A fountain with a jet of water for every year that Elvis lived in Tupelo, MS. There is birth, the next 16 years, then in a tiny little corner off to the left...

Death... 1977.

 Hurry Hurry!! No time to stop for a photo because the old ladies behind us were REALLY big Elvis fans and needed to get into the parking lot PRONTO. Seriously... with the honking and tailgaiting, I didn't know if we were going to make it out alive.

 Next we stopped off at the church that my family had moved down here for in the first place. Out in the woods all kinds of crazy things can happen without the general population finding out about it...

Such a pew burnings and what-not...

Creepy Southern Baptists.

 Between all of our belongings in the back and having to check out of the hotel before we left, there was no place for Molly and I to sit except for in the exact same spot. Unfortunately for me, she actually takes up more space than I do!

 The church from afar... exactly as I remembered it. Such a creepy feeling.

Nice to know...

NOW!!!