The tell tale heart

Hilary and I continued to explore around Richmond today.

Which means more old, and new things to explore. Highlights included cafe con leche and empanadas at one Kuba Kuba, a favorite eclectic cafe in the fan. Walking through historic Hollywood Cemetery downtown, and a first time visit to the Poe Museum.

Talk about a tragic, haunted life. Edgar Allen Poe was born to a young aspiring actress in Richmond in the mid 1800's shortly before the civil war. At that time Richmond was a bustling cosmopolitan city and later became the capital of the confederacy, and hence the south. Acting was looked down upon stiff victorian influenced citizens at that time as immoral, brazen, scandalous. Poe's mom died young and he was forced to fend for himself at age 2 with his sister. Taken in by a wealthy aristocratic family he was brought up in the higher echelon's of Richmond society. He chafed at his foster father's demanding rules and ambitions for him though and left home at an early age.

Trying to make it as a write then was even harder than it is now. Living mostly in poverty though Poe wrote essays, columns, and eventually books and poems that are American classics today. His most famous tales are full of death, tragedy and the horrors of fate. Stories like The Raven and The Tell Tale Heart are what we remember Poe by most today. Lost loves, the specter of death, treachery, poverty, war, and alcoholism, among a bizarrely unlucky life infuses his fiction.

Walking around the small museum was a little spooky to say the least. A glimpse into a beautiful, but tragic tale of the heart...