an excerpt from a sermon preached on July 30, 2006
Today, my parents would have celebrated their 76th Wedding Anniversary. Sixteen years ago, after their return from celebrating their 60th, Mama came through the back door grinning from ear to ear. That was not my mother’s usual look, but on that particular day she beamed like a smitten teenage girl. She went on and on about what they saw, everything they did, and all their meals. I didn’t recall ever seeing her like that. Little did she know that they had celebrated their last anniversary together. In less than a month, her life was taken prematurely.
Just a few days after their return from their trip, Daddy filled the pulpit for a pastor friend. His message was entitled “Listening for God.” The following is an excerpt from that message:
“This week we celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary by going to Helen, GA. Here’s a story I picked up about old times from those Georgia Blue Mountains” —
“On those mornings when the old wooden bridge would be covered by heavy frost, the sight of his bare footprints would make us hurt all over. He would cross the bridge first, then we would cross. The cold prints of his bare feet would appear as though they had been burned into the planks of the old wooden bridge. The girl would carefully scrape away all signs of his bare footprints with her shiny, expensive little shoes, as if that would make his feet warmer, but when we got to school his feet would still be blue from the cold. I never knew him to own or wear a pair of shoes.
She was the prettiest girl in the whole valley and her father owned one of the largest and finest farms. His family lived back in the mountains, and his father sold moonshine whisky. He believed that was the reason he had built the wall between the girls and himself. It was an invisible wall, and Grandma said that was the hardest kind to get rid of. It was as if he were doing penance for the wrongs of his father by his own suffering.
The war came on. The boy enlisted, and we never saw him gain. It was the girl’s mother who told Grandma about them seeing the boy for the last time. They had been in Atlanta and were on Peachtree Street. Everybody stopped so a company of soldiers could march by. Somebody in the crowd said they were going overseas to fight in the war. At their front was a big strapping first sergeant, who except of his uniform and his fine army shoes looked like the barefoot boy from the mountains.
When they reached the girls and her mother, the first sergeant ordered the soldiers to halt. There they stood, not 10 feet apart, and when he turned and looked into her eyes, the invisible wall came tumbling down with a roar like thunder that must have been heard way back to the valley. With all those people looking on and hearing what he said, the mountain boy, who had never spoken one word to the girl in all his life, said the three words she most wanted to hear.
He only had a one-way ticket to the hell of France, and she would never see him again. She came back to the valley. Grandma told us that you would see her come out of the house in the evenings and walk down the road as far as the old wooden bridge. There she would stand for a while, staring at the worn planks as if she hoped to see those bare frosty footprints, even in the hot summertime.”
Now, both of my parents are gone. When I visit the prairies of my mother’s youth or walk in the mountains of my father’s younger days, even then I look for their footsteps. Though I can no longer see their footprints, I often think I hear their faint voices in the wind.