Home Is Where The Heart Is This Thanksgiving Season: CenturyOld Church Oak Felled By Lightning Finds Renewed Life, Legacy, In Pair Of Heart-Shaped Tables, Reclaimed Keepsakes.
Home is where the heart is this Thanksgiving season.
And now equally sorrowful voids in both heart and home are fully filled for Cartersville widower Bob Bearden during a time of year when loss of loved ones cuts most deep.
His eldest of two adult daughters, Stephanie Bearden Moore of Acworth, has unwaveringly arranged to have everything made beautiful again for her aging father.
And, most especially, in the fleeting time they have left together.
So too has a Rome craftsman, who Moore commissioned for this special woodworking project on her late mother’s 84th birthday observance at the end of last year.
The two then set a course to imaginatively capture the life force essence and generational memories made in the shade of a towering 150-year-old oak tree felled by midsummer 2020 lightning at Center Baptist Church.
They would deliver it back to Moore’s father in renewed form and function on what would have been his 68th wedding anniversary to his late wife Opal. And they did just that.
But this was no ordinary project. Nor was this any ordinary tree. It was a grand old legacy church oak rooted in faith, legacy, and love, Moore said.
Its dominion presence was rivaled only in height by the church steeple itself.
As a sapling, it tempted trajectory fates of Union soldiers’ marching boots inasmuch the march of time along McKaskey Creek Road that abruptly vanishes like a distant memory into the murky shallows of Lake Allatoona’s northern shore.
The lofty oak, whose mythology hearkened to Balkan thunder but inevitably fell to Appalachian lightning, represented so much to so many.
And for so very long.
Of all its enduring metaphorical qualities, it was a tree – the tree – that from under its hallowed branches decades earlier Bob Bearden promised his childhood friends he’d “one day marry that pretty little girl” named Opal, their daughter said.
And it was only until death did they part after 67 married years together in April 2020 when Opal passed from heart complications did the Beardens storybook tale of devotion reach its final chapter.
But as scripture foretells, everything is made beautiful again in its own time with eternity set in the human heart.
And so the mighty oak clung to life just long enough to reveal a wind of treasures deep from within.
When church caretakers finally cut down the ailing tree, certain to collapse any day onto the adjacent cemetery, amidst tons of thick trunk and heaps of leafy debris, there lay a nearly perfect heart-shaped section formed naturally from its center spiral grain.
“I knew then it was a miracle in the
making,” said Moore following an Oct. 31 church service and unveiling to churchgoers that coincided on the Beardens’ wedding anniversary. “Our prayers for a most lovely and enduring way to honor my mother’s memory for many more years to come have been answered. The handcrafted tables, heart pendants, heart-shaped cutting boards, and Bible stand all are just absolutely gorgeous.”
Moore said she plans to bestow the trove of deeply meaningful handcrafted keepsakes to friends and family as remembrance gifts this Christmastime.
Rome craftsman Brian Matlick II kept a tempered pace in his backyard wood shop since the project officially launched on Opal’s posthumous birthday observance.
The project took painstaking months to complete with dozens of hours focused in preparation alone – one errant cut or drop of a dry frail section spelled certain catastrophe.
From slowly kiln drying the 400-plus pound trunk section, to cutting it in precise halves, to then applying thick glossy bubble-free protective epoxy coats under brutal summer heat and humidity along with a residential relocation from West Rome to Summerville Park. Matlick had his work cut out for him. But it was as much about providence as personal pride for his growing B.K. & the Saw Dogs woodworking and epoxy-forming home business, he said.
“Once in a lifetime,” said the former award-winning chef from Hershey, Pa., who combined his culinary past with modern day alchemy to meld 48 perfectly-shaped ideograph opalescent heart pendants in plastic chocolate molds with shavings from the tree suspended inside that glimmer of mini galaxies in the midday sun.
“I’m just so happy to have had the opportunity to honor Opal and her family in such a profoundly lasting way,” Matlick added. “I mean this was really cool.”
The pair of tables symbolize dual destinies of enduring love and restorative preservation, Stephanie Moore said.
And they now form a trio presence with Bob Bearden’s Thanksgiving table that capture the symbolic legacy of the old churchyard oak tree with his late wife Opal’s spirit standing in their midst twice as tall.
“It’s most meaningful to me that we can put our hands on pieces of this tree and carry it with us as tangible reminders of my parents’ beautiful meeting wherever we go,” said the Bearden’s younger daughter Julie Bearden Carver, a former church pianist and performing arts instructor in Rome and Cartersville prior to moving out-of-state earlier this year.
“My nephew and I worked on a genealogy project years ago and traced my parents’ ancestry back several generations in Bartow County,” Carver added.
“I would love to think that tree had been there for several generations just waiting to fulfill its role and destiny in all our lives.”