The Mississippi writer, Eudora Welty, is a master of the Southern regional short story. Welty writes in a unique, often humorous style about small-town Mississippi life, capturing regional eccentricities of Southern locales and their people. Welty's stream-of-consciousness short story ''Why I Live at the P.O.'' is told in dramatic monologue fashion by the older of two sisters (called simply "Sister" in the story), who has just moved into the town's post office ("the P.O.") Sister has been driven there by her quarrelsome family: younger sister Stella Rondo, Stella Rondo's two-year-old daughter Shirley T; Mama; their grandfather (Papa-Daddy); and an uncle. Stella Rondo, separated from her husband, and has come home, unannounced, child in tow. Shirley T, she says, is adopted. But Sister not only sees but remarks on Shirley T's resemblance to Papa-Daddy: "she was the spit-image of Papa-Daddy if he cut off his beard." That seemingly off-hand comment fuels enough tension to force Sister's move to the P.O. When Uncle Rondo "threw a whole five-cent package of some unsold one-inch firecrackers from the store as hard as he could into my bedroom and they every one went off," Sister gets the idea, loud and clear. This also raises several puzzling questions for the reader. Why are they so angry at Sister? Why does the whole family seem so similar in their outspoken eccentricity? Who, for that matter, might Sister's and Stella Rondo's own father be? And what is Uncle Rondo's exact relationship to them all?.

             Unlike Sarty Snopes in "Barn Burning", however, Sister does not reach epiphany, or even the beginnings of physical, economic, or psychological independence. Her new home at the P.O. is, after all, entirely subsidized by her own family. Sister would have no job as China Grove's Postmistress, if it had not been arranged by Papa-Daddy, the very man she flees. Sister's family is also "the main people in China Grove" and most mail that supports the post office is either for or from them.