For Wilshire Baptist Church
LeAnn and I have taken some memorable road trips together, and that was the case earlier this week as we made a 700-mile loop down through the heart of Texas, over to the southeastern-most corner of the state, and back up through the East Texas Piney Woods to home. We didn’t retrace our path at all — except briefly a couple of times when we missed a turn on the backroads — and the purpose of our trip was not sight-seeing or recreation but paying our respects and remembering.
The trip was prompted by two memorial services for family and friends in Belton and Beaumont. And as if that itinerary was not alliterative enough, we made a stop in Bryan to visit a friend who recently lost his father. The memorial services were lovely and inspirational and full of fond remembrances of people beloved by their families and communities. These gatherings are always a backward glance to what was, and the grieving comes in knowing the future has changed. Appropriately, however, both services had a forward look to what is possible in the Kingdom of God and how to carry on with the best of what we learned from those who are with us no more.
Sandwiched between both services was an overnight stay in my mother’s hometown of Orange, which was the home of my grandparents and thus for me the source of many indelible childhood memories. It had been 35 years since I was there, and it would be naive to not expect things to have changed dramatically. On top of that, I knew that Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Harvey in 2017 had devastated the town, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how much had been lost.
Most of the change I saw was communal. Empty lots sat between what once were rows of old, elegant houses. The main commercial lanes and downtown riverfront that once teemed with activity were pockmarked with abandoned buildings. Most notable all over town was the absence of the towering pines, oaks and pecans that made Orange so different from my childhood neighborhood on the North Texas prairie.
Some of the change was very personal. The massive oak and pecan trees that shaded my grandparents’ property were gone, and so the feeling of shady respite that I always felt when we’d drive up for a visit was missing. The house itself was vacant and battered and bruised from wind, rain and neglect. Looking through the dirty windows, there was a sad feeling of abandonment. The azalea hedges in front were gone, and the lush vegetable and rose gardens in back had been overtaken by weeds and debris. The carport under which I once played and got eaten up by mosquitos was twisted and fallen down. As we walked through the damp weeds, a skinny grass snake slithered by, apparently the only living thing at what once was a home full of life.
I don’t know if my childish eyes deceived me back in the day, but Orange seemed to me to be a perfect little town. Perhaps our innocent eyes just don’t notice the blemishes. After all, when I was there in the 1960s and 1970s, the town was already shrinking from the wartime shipbuilding boom of the ’40s and ’50s. Perhaps even back then, the locals were saying to themselves, “this town isn’t what it used to be.” But to me, it was an oasis, and I have faith that the town even now is in the process of re-creating itself for a bright future.
Before leaving Orange, we stopped downtown at the Farmers Mercantile where my grandfather worked after his retirement as the county agricultural extension agent. It’s been operating near the banks of the Sabine River since 1928, and inside and out it looked and smelled probably as it always has. Dressed in our funeral clothes, we perused the plants out on the porch, looked around inside and chatted with the clerk. We left with a geranium, an asparagus seedling and some garden gloves.
Maybe those were more than just souvenir purchases; maybe we were buying pieces of the past to plant for the future. Easter is, after all, a time to prepare for a future where there is no sadness and no decay – where memory lanes are bustling with eternal energy.