Where you come from is gone

"Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it." Flannery O 'Connor

Like this observation, O'Connor's stories are unique and unexpected. I am a fan of O'Connor's short stories and I was eager to see the places in Georgia that influenced her writing, especially the farm outside of Milledgeville, Georgia, named Andalusia. This picturesque 544 acre farm served as inspiration for several of her stories.

Her stories include misfits and murderers, thieves, illiterates and prophets. Her voice is now recognized as one of the most original in American fiction.

"Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, the only child of Catholic parents. In 1945 she enrolled at the Georgia State College for Women. After earning her degree she continued her studies on the University of Iowa's writing program. Her writing is best-known for its explorations of religious themes and southern racial issues, and for combining the comic with the tragic.

After university, she moved to New York where she continued to write. In 1952 at the age of 29 she learned that she was dying of lupus, a disease which had afflicted her father. For the rest of her life, she and her mother lived on the family dairy farm, Andalusia, outside Millidgeville, Georgia. For pleasure she raised peacocks, pheasants, swans, geese, chickens and Muscovy ducks. She died in the summer of 1964 at the age of thirty-nine."

On the front of the house is a great screened-in porch with a set of white wicker rocking chairs that look out to white oaks, magnolias, hickories and pines. At the bottom of the hill is a large pond.

The house interior is now very close to the way it looked when Flannery lived there.

Behind the house are pecan trees and cedars as well as a place where peacocks are kept.

She wrote to a friend,"I used to say I wanted so many of them [peacocks] that every time I went out the door I stepped on one. Now every time I go out the door one steps on me."

Just a few miles up the road is the Georgia College in Milledgeville where she attended and which now features a special room in her honor.

Flannery with her mother.

I walked to the other side of this exquisite town from the College to visit Flannery's grave in Memory Hill Cemetery. The few tokens of respect left at her gravesite are testament to the ongoing relevance of her writing to her fans.