Home Again, Home Again, Clippety Clop

Saturday morning my sister and I drove down to our hometown, about 5 hours south of KC. It's been 18 years since I've been to Ava. Everything has changed. Nothing has changed.

The highways now bypass most of the little towns. Cars no longer pause at the one stoplight in the one-stoplight towns that dot the map. Travelers miss Peggy's Cafe and her great grilled cheese sandwiches. They sail along, two miles from The Exotic Animal Paradise, without a glimpse of the water buffalo or the gnu. The hills that first drew tourists have been blasted away to make room for roads to handle the traffic.

But the spindly blue play fort still stands beside the train tracks in Seymour. The Tastee Freeze still serves swirly cones in Mansfield. Water still trickles through the bedrock of the creek bed at the Roadside Park.

Our first little house still sits in the corner of a pie-shaped lot. The old oak that held my tree house is gone, though. So is the wood treating plant my father owned for decades and the timber yard he ran. The police department fills the front portion of the old Rawlings plant, where patient women once sewed baseball gloves while their husbands chewed 'baccy and spit on the sidewalks of the town square.

Our family gathered in the basement of Uncle Jim's church. Good Christian women served ham and green beans, chicken and mashed potatoes. There was pie and coffee. Sweet tea and lemonade. There were tears and laughter and shock at how much and how little had changed since last we gathered.

Aunt Agnes showed off photographs of the 3 x 4 ft. rendition of the Last Supper she crocheted for her church. It's her second one. She did the first sitting in parking lots in front of bars, waiting for her first husband, my grandfather's brother. Cedric died. Agnes remarried. Her new husband is a kind, loving man who treats her like a queen. She swore she'd never crochet another Supper, but Bob's church wanted one so badly. At least she got to do this one sitting in a comfortable chair in her own living room.

Aunt Jenny just got back from volunteering on a float for the Rose Parade. For two and a half days she stood on a 6-ft. ladder, gluing iris petals to a horn held by an animated frog. She's 78. Her husband, Keith, died a couple years ago after living with Alzheimers for almost a decade. Nothing will ever be that hard again.

Uncle Bill, my father's next older brother, came from California. At the grave side, he wore a tan golf jacket over his suit. Been so long since he lived in Missouri that he forgot he'd need a coat this time of year. Doesn't actually own a coat, but he would have bought one if he'd thought of it.

Uncle Jim left very specific directives for his service. Wrote most of it himself. He grabbed us from the opening line: "Jim did not earn his Salvation through good works." Nothing left but enough ashes and dust to fill a 6 x 8-inch faux-stone box, but he was still "leading souls to Christ."

This place. These people. They're in my blood, in my bones. They are part of me and I of them. We witness one another's rites of passage: births, weddings, deaths. We hold hands in hospital rooms. We stand together beside open graves.

We stand together.