I remember when her mother died. Mom’s heart was broken, and I thought I understood. Soon after, Mom and I and my daughters went to a Mother/Daughter Banquet to celebrate Mother’s Day. I was celebrating her – my mother, and I told her so. But Mom was not celebrating. Her heart was broken from the loss of her own mother, my Grandma Locke. And again, I thought I understood.
I recently wrote about things we experience that we never forget. There’s something you’ve experienced. A memory. It’s in your mind for good. It’s yours. Your memory. Your experience. You own it.
Others might not understand or relate, but that’s okay. It’s something special God has given you.
Daddy and Mama bought the big yellow house when I was 13 months old. Surrounded by red barns, white board fences, chicken coops, and corn cribs, the house sat on 80 acres of fields, pastures, and woods, bordering a creek. They paid $10,000 for it. Grandpa Nutt said they’d never live to see it paid! But my Grandpa was wrong.
It doesn’t look like much. And to most, it probably isn’t much. Just a soap dish, from K-Mart, one might assume. Probably purchased in the 50’s. Pink plastic with removable drainer. The gold trim of its crown nearly worn from years of scouring with Comet Cleanser. At first glance, one might easily overlook the esteemed position it held through the years.
We could often see Route 66 running parallel to the Interstate. Any time we could get onto the actual Mother Road was good. We tried. And in New Mexico, we had opportunity several times.
When I was a little girl, Reverend Robert Lindner held summer Vacation Bible School at our little country church around the corner from our big yellow house. The week before the event, he drove the dusty roads with a megaphone speaker atop his car, announcing the upcoming Bible School, inviting the children as they played in their yards, and creating excitement amongst our farm community!
I drive past it nearly every day, on my way somewhere. Today, though, I pull over and park my car in the lot, now overlaid with weeds. I look at the church – an unkempt building that has been empty for many years now – and I listen. No music flows through its closed windows. No children laugh or play on the rotted teeter-totter in its side yard. No pastor preaches from its pulpit. Instead, I hear the sounds of the country – the birds, the leaves kissing the breeze, a tractor in the distance,