Tupelo is a type of gum tree that’s native to Mississippi. It looks not unlike cypress, and both of them are found growing straight out of the swamp waters. It’s difficult to tell the two apart, except that the cypress have woody knobs poking up through the water all around their bases. They look like wooden stalagmites and, really, complete the whole “swamp look.” Without them, a swamp would be passed off as just a flooded forest, I think. These knobs are technically called “knees” and are sent up by the roots to acquire more oxygen and keep the trees from drowning.

There’s also a town here named Tupelo, which happens to be where Elvis Aaron Presley was born. He was born in the front room of a two-room shotgun shack back in 1935 and lived there until age 13 when his family moved to Memphis. We stopped by the house which has been nicely restored. Shotgun-style architecture seems to have enjoyed certain popularity in these parts. It’s where the house is only as wide as one room and additional rooms fall inline behind. There aren’t hallways, so to get from the front to the back you have to travel through the rooms that lay between. Additionally, all the doors line up so that if you were to open all of ‘em, you could stand in the front yard and shoot a bullet clean through the house without doin’ damage. Voila, a “shotgun shack.”

While in Mississippi we scoured several cemeteries in the Pontotoc area in search of Holly’s great-great grandfather’s grave. We didn’t have much to go on, other than that his resting place ought to be located near this small town. For whatever reason, our GPS points out cemeteries, so we let it set the course as we chased around several sites. I don’t know how the GPS gets its information, but it even had us searching overgrown cemeteries in the middle of the woods that hadn’t seen any business in a lot of moons. Be that as it may, we turned up nothing after a couple of hours and threw in the towel as the sun began to go down. It was disappointing, but not entirely unexpected.