Interstate 77 winds around the mountains of Bland County like lifelines on the palm of
my hand. I cross through the Big Walker Mountain tunnel and know I am home. I crack the
window for a fresh breath of southwestern Virginia air and hear music beyond the wind and
the butterflies.
I've come home to attend the funeral of my great-uncle Wendell Newberry. This stretch
of Route 617 traces the roots of my family tree. We pass the family homestead of four
generations--where my Uncle Randy and his family still live. Adjacent to the cemetery, my
parents and I pass the farmhouse that belonged to my family when they were dairy farmers.
A serenade of dulcimer, banjo, and fiddle rises from Stone Age creek beds, now empty
but filled with song. It's a lonesome twang that resonates in the county my grandparents
claimed as their own. I remember the land, but growing up I felt I had no grandparents
because I had no memories of them. My father's father died when my dad was 15. My other
grandfather and both grandmothers died within six months of my birth. The grief I had
experienced at the death of other grandparent figures--my great-grandmother Miss Lu, my
great-aunts Elsie and Carrie, and now my great-uncle Wendell--pulled to the surface the
intense grief I felt at never having known my grandparents, which became a divining rod
for a deep well of love and gratitude buried inside me.
Theologian Kirk Webb says that Christians are called "to know our past, so we are
compelled to love others in the present." I long to hear a sound that would draw me
up to the back porch of a house in the hills to meet the grandparents I have never felt in
my arms--Mamaw, Papaw, Gram, and Poppa Cecil. I'd pull a chair up next to my grandmother,
hold her hand, and tell her everything that has happened. I'd hear the way the mountain
accent wraps itself around my grandfather's laugh. It will be as if I had just walked to
an old dried-up well to make a wish but came back because everyone I could wish for was
already there. "Remembering pulls us toward the truth," Webb says.
"Remembering is our responsibility as Christians because we are people of memory who
are of a God that does not forget."
THE FELLOWSHIP TIME following Uncle Wendell's funeral was also an act of memory--his
wry sense of humor and his deep, loving laugh that rustled like doves flying over the
countryside. As a family we revisited the lives, deaths, and burials that had brought us
there. This offering of memories honored our family as one of God. This story-telling act
of reverence transubstantiated our offering into worship as we returned Wendell Newberry
and the others back to God.
The recollections that day pulled from me an unknown grief, but they also provided a
joy rooted in the love in which my grandparents lived in their 50-something years--and the
love they had for me. This realization opened a whole world for me: to know that they
loved me before I was born and love me now; to know that a powerful love envelops me in my
days.
Until I get to them, I'll continue to drive through the hills and let the mountains
whisper to me in thoughts that seem to be my own. A song wails to me in the wind across
the mountaintop. It covers me heavy like fog and warm like a quilt. "Walk these hills
like we have done and soon, soon you will find us here." My grandparents encircle me
in old hymns, meals spread across tablecloths, the family Bible, and old volumes of
English poetry. I feel all four of them in the gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John, and the preacher at a Saturday night revival. They seep into me like the smell
of Sunday supper, comfort me like a shot of whiskey. Their mountains are a quilt flung
wide onto a bed, with curves and wrinkles settled across its landscape before it is
smoothed out. There's a settledness, a comfort about the bedcover, and about the mountains
across the valleys, that I can tuck myself into.
ELIZABETH NEWBERRY is an Appalachian writer and activist, as well as a former Sojourners
intern.
Read other articles by:
Newberry, Elizabeth
|
Subscribe to Sojourners today at a special introductory price and save $10 off the basic rate! Click here for details.
WE WANT TO HEAR from you! Click here to share your views. Or write to "Letters," Sojourners, 3333 14th St. NW, Suite 200, Washington DC 20010; fax (202) 328-8757. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for space and clarity.
|
|
 |
Read other articles by:
Newberry, Elizabeth
|
