Labor of love
I just got back from my annual trip to Appalachia. Southwest Virginia, specifically. In Pulaski County, Virginia, there is a farm where my family has deep roots. It belonged to my people in my family going back generations. Every August, we gather for a family reunion on the farm. On a hill overlooking one of the pastures is a cemetery where those who came before us going back two centuries are buried. Part of our reunion is us singing and praying in that cemetery, remembering our ancestors in the place where they rest.
Little Creek, clear and babbling, runs by the farm. There is no easy way to get there. You have to drive a ways through the mountains no matter which way you go.
There is another cemetery two counties over in
Wythe County, Virginia, situated in downtown Wytheville, where my great, great grandparents, George Grant Baumgardner and Emma Buck Baumgardner are buried. Great, Great Grandfather George built the farmhouse out on the farm. A year ago, during a Friday morning on last year’s trip, dad and I went to that cemetery to their graves. Great, Great
Grandmother Emma’s tombstone had fallen into a bit of disrepair. A couple of pieces of it had broken off and fallen into the grass nearby. Dad and I set it right. When I left the farm the following Saturday night, there was a mist on the rise. My car rolled down Little Creek Road as the sun set behind the mountains to my right. After darkness came, the mountains breathed and fog rolled off of them. It occurred to me that in an hour or so that fog would fill the whole valley. Before I got back to the hotel, it was impossible to see anything beyond the highway.
I had been thinking that day about that morning, when dad and I set the broken pieces back into Great, Great Grandmother Emma’s tombstone.
That act, in and of itself, was a rather simple one. But it was done with great love. And that love makes it something so much greater than the act itself. It was an act of love done by two people for someone they had never met and would never meet, because she died before either of them were born. And yet, that love exists and endures because the memory of that beloved is not extinguished.
That act of love, simple in itself, flows from something that transcends time and defies death. Love like that can bind us together across vast distances, even beyond the veil and across the worlds.
‘Til next week.