I have much, much to be
thankful for this year. Topping the list are all the dear people in my
life — my husband, my two boys, my three little sisters and their
families, my brother, my DeWoody in-laws, my kinfolks, my widespread
friends.
   Good health — something I usually take for granted — is
also at the top of my list of “Thank you’s.” My own good health, and
that of my husband and family, is one of our biggest gifts, and one I
am very grateful for this week. We have close friends who are
struggling with serious illnesses in their families, and as my heart
goes out to them and I pray for them, it makes me once again aware of
what a blessing it is that we currently don’t have anyone in the
hospital or the nursing home or the Hospice House.
   My Sunday School
teacher at the Methodist Church in Mississippi used to tell us, “If
you’re not in the middle of a crisis right now, you will be soon, so
enjoy the peaceful interlude while you can, and be grateful for it.”
   I
AM grateful for our health, and for our families and friends, for our
church, for our jobs, for our pets, for our adopted hometown of
Harrison, for our adopted homeland in the Ozarks. I am so thankful that
our good Father led us to this lovely place full of warm, caring people.
   Along
with all of these blessings is a new one that has just been given to us
in the past few weeks, and it is a big, big blessing: We’ve bought a
house in Harrison!
   We once felt a little bit like old Father
Abraham, leaving most of our kinfolks behind in south Florida and
moving up here “unto a land that He showed us.” But our roots are
growing deeper and deeper into this rich, rocky soil.
   Ever since we
moved up here three years ago, Doyle and I have been looking for just
the right house for us, keeping in mind that the time might come when
it was the right thing for everybody for Doyle’s mom, Ruby, to move in
with us.
   We’ve talked about living in the country. We’ve talked
about living in town. We’ve talked about building in the country. We’ve
talked about building in town. We’ve looked at houses. We’ve driven out
into the hills and dreamed. We’ve sketched out house plans.
   But none of these seemed just exactly right.
   I’m
the kind of person who operates from the heart rather than from the
head, and I’ve always told Doyle, “I think when the time is right,
we’ll just KNOW what to do. When our house comes along, we’ll know it
when we see it.”
   In order to understand the rest of this story from
my point of view, you need to know my background with houses. As a
little girl, I moved almost every year of my life, from Navy base to
Navy base. Most of the houses we lived in had nondescript wall-to-wall
carpet and popcorn ceilings and tiny bedrooms and flimsy doors.
   My
life’s other important houses were all old ones. My grandmother Poppy’s
house in Mississippi, built in the 1850s. My great-grandparents’ home
right on the beach in Gulfport, built in the late 1800s. My boys’
grandparents’ farmhouse in Mississippi, built right after the Civil
War. And then, the house that I loved (and sometimes hated) for almost
20 years, my very own old Mississippi house, the one I raised my boys
in. Probably begun in the mid-1800s and added onto throughout the
years, it had a wrap-around front porch and tall windows and high
ceilings and porcelain doorknobs and heart-pine floors and a huge
cast-iron, claw-foot tub (and drafts and no insulation and hardly any
closets ... but we loved it.)
   So when you say “Home” to me, I see a
big old white house with lots of steps up to the front porch. I can’t
help it. New houses, as beautiful as they can be, just don’t feel like
home to me.
   Every time we’ve driven by a tall old white house, my heart has yearned.
   Doyle’s
never been as in love with the idea of an old house as I have, being of
a more practical mindset when it comes to things like leaking faucets
and uneven floors and lack of insulation in attics.
   But a couple of
weeks ago, he was reading the classified page in the Sunday Times and
spotted an ad for an old home on South Maple Street. We looked it up
online, and recognized a house we’ve driven by many times and admired.
   Well,
we went to look at it, and something magical happened. It was just like
I had imagined. When we walked around the house and the yard, we just
knew. Doyle, too. And Ruby. This was meant to be our house. It was
whispering to us — just like Harrison had on our first visit almost
four years ago — “Welcome home.”
  Heart-pine floors. Porcelain
doorknobs. Tall, double-hung windows. A big old cast-iron bathtub.
Upstairs bedrooms with slanting walls. Interesting nooks and crannies.
A place for Doyle’s woodshop. A huge yard with big trees, a sunny spot
for a garden — and an Ozarks dogwood to bloom next to our side porch
next spring.
  We’ll be moving very soon to our very own little piece of our beloved Ozarks. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!

By Celia DeWoody
Published Nov. 26, 2008, Harrison (Ark.)  Daily Times
Copyright 2008 CPI, Inc.

Hey, friends!
I'm ready to change this autumn color scheme over to Christmas!
I've been snowed under with a big project at work, and starting to pack to move into our new old house! We closed on Thursday, and will be moving in by the end of the first week in December. As it's only three blocks from where we currently live, we're moving things ourselves as we get them packed, and then will get some guys to help move the big stuff.
We're very excited. Doyle's mom, Ruby, is going to be moving with us. She'll be in a big downstairs bedroom and Doyle and I will be upstairs.
What a blessing! We have a lot to be grateful for this Thanksgiving.
What are you especially grateful for this week, my friends?

Hey, friends!
What are y'all planning for the weekend?

  ‘Freedom has a taste’

  I'm
writing this column on Election Day morning, one week before Veterans
Day. As I write, I'm wearing a bracelet I haven't worn in a long time.
  The
bracelet feels very familiar on my left wrist, because it's one I wore
every day for four years. I got it when I was in the ninth grade, and I
didn't stop wearing it until 1973, just before I graduated from high
school.
  It's not a pretty piece of jewelry —  flat and
silver-colored, made out of some kind of cheap metal. The silver paint
on the inside is completely rubbed away from being worn for so long. It
has no decorations, just some words and numbers in block type:

  It's
a POW bracelet, made to be worn in honor of Americans being held
prisoner by the North Vietnamese. To remind us to pray for them and
their families. To help us remember that brave men were being held
captive by our enemies. To remind us that freedom has a price. That War
has a face.
 We wore the bracelets with the commitment that we would continue to wear them until our prisoners were released.
I'm
wearing this bracelet again today for several reasons. The first is
because I'm hoping and praying that another Vietnam-era Navy pilot,
another former prisoner of war, will be, by the time you read this, our
new president-elect.
  The second, is because I feel a connection to
Capt. Crayton. You kind of feel like you know somebody when you wear
their name around your wrist — and pray for them — for four years.
  And
the third, and probably most powerful reason, is because the POW
bracelet reminds me of my father. Today, when the eyes of the world are
on two men, one of them a Vietnam-era Naval aviator like my dad, my
mind is much on my late father, the veteran of three combat tours.
While flying his RA5-C Vigilante over enemy territory, he could easily
have been shot down, like his comrade John McCain was, like many of his
friends were. Like my best friend Diana's father was. Unlike my dad,
John McCain and Render Crayton, Diana’s daddy never came home.
  Up
until this morning, all I knew about Crayton was that he was a Navy
pilot who had been shot down and captured by the Vietnamese, and that
he had been one of those who came home alive.
  Because I found the
worn old bracelet in a drawer this morning, I was curious to learn more
about the man whose name it bears. I did a Google search on “Render
Crayton,” and soon found myself reading a feature story published Oct.
11 in the Idaho Statesman, by a reporter named Dan Popkey. Then I found
a second story, based on another interview Popkey did with Crayton,
this one about his friend and fellow prisoner, John McCain.
  I
learned that Crayton was McCain’s advanced-flight instructor for four
months in Corpus Christi before the war. They also spent several months
together in a 40-man cellblock in the infamous prison, the Hanoi
Hilton. Crayton knew McCain well. He’s supporting him for president.
  A
native Southerner, Render Crayton was born in North Carolina in 1933,
the same year Daddy was born in Mississippi. His Navy career spanned 30
years, including the seven he spent as a prisoner of war in North
Vietnam. Flying an A-4 Skyhawk based on the USS Ticonderoga, he was
shot down Feb. 7, 1966 — the date on my bracelet. After he ejected from
his wounded jet, he broke his right shoulder, which never healed
correctly because of lack of treatment.
  From the ground, in enemy
territory, he radioed the other planes in his flight and gave his
position, and two of his fellow A-4s strafed the area around where he
had landed, trying to protect him from the North Vietnamese. A
helicopter was dispatched to go pick him up, but it was slow in
arriving. Worried that they would run out of fuel, Crayton asked that
the fighters patrolling the area to protect him go back to safety.
 By
the time the rescue helicopter finally arrived, his parachute was still
there, but Crayton was gone —  captured by the enemy. The young pilot
spent the next two years in solitary confinement. He was imprisoned for
a total of seven years in camps in and around Hanoi. During that time,
like John McCain, he was brutally tortured by his captors.
Along with McCain and about 600 other prisoners of war, Crayton was finally released in 1973.
  I'll
never forget when the prisoners were released. I was a senior in high
school in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Our family gathered around the TV
to watch news coverage of the first POWs getting off the big C-141As
that had brought them to Clark Air Force base in the Philippines.
  They
emerged one by one from the door of the plane, emaciated and pale, and
walked, as straight and tall as they could with their improperly healed
broken bones, down the steps, and proudly saluted the American military
men waiting for them. I’ll never forget watching one of the frail
former POWs gingerly kneel on the hot runway and kiss the concrete of
the U. S. base, overcome with joy at being once again on American soil.
  I
watched with tears running down my cheeks. I still can't watch or read
anything about prisoners of war without getting very emotional. These
men were my dad’s comrades-in-arms. These were men like the pilots I
had grown up around, like the fathers of my friends, our neighbors on
the Navy bases where I grew up.
  I’m so happy to know now that
retired Navy Captain Render Crayton is alive and well and living in
Ketchum, Idaho. I’d love to be able to talk to him. I’d love to be able
to thank him. But for today, I’ll just wear his bracelet one more time,
in tribute to him and to the other brave men like him. Men like John
McCain. Men like my father.
“Freedom has a taste to those who fought
and almost died for it, that the protected shall never know.”
 (Written
by an unknown author on a cell wall in the Hanoi Hilton)

Years ago, I fell in love with a poem called “The Marshes of Glynn”
by Sidney Lanier, an 19th-century musician and poet from Georgia, and
I've tucked away lovely bits of it in a mental apron pocket.
   In his
lyrical verses about the salt marshes that divide the Sea Islands of
Glynn County, Georgia, from the mainland, Lanier celebrates the island
forests, as well. He describes their “beautiful glooms, soft dusks in
the noon-day fire ...”

His description of the woods, especially of
the interplay of light and dark, has stayed with me, and I think of his
words often when I'm walking through our own Ozarks woods that remind
me of the poet's “braided dusks of the oak and woven shades of the vine
...”

   Lanier loved the forests of coastal Georgia  — his “dim, sweet woods ... the dear, dark woods” — like I love ours.
Doyle
and I went back to the Schermerhorn Trail near Compton for a leisurely
hike on Sunday — a cool, breezy, shiny-golden October day. I don't
think I've ever been on a prettier walk. The buttery sunshine poured
through the woods canopy, making the leaves glow like stained glass in
every shade of green, gold, yellow, orange and red. The wind was just
shifting around to the north as it prepared to blow a cold front
through, so the leaves were trembling in the breeze and letting go of
their twigs to flutter down like soft, jewel-toned rain.

   Through the
forest's shade — Lanier's “emerald twilights” — slanting sunbeams
darted through here and there, spotlighting and transforming a branch
of yellow leaves to melted gold, turning a fallen red leaf to a glowing
ember.

For my husband and me, walking through our own “dim, sweet
woods” is the ideal way to spend a Sunday afternoon, and this time of
year, the hiking is close to perfect. The air is cool and fresh, the
bugs are just about gone, and even the poison ivy is fading away. And
best of all, the fall leaves turn the woods into a colorful
kaleidoscope.

   When I'm walking in the woods, my worries fall away,
my problems evaporate and my priorities seem to shift back into their
proper order.
   I believe Sundays are supposed to be special days,
days when we don’t work, days when we honor the God who made us, and
rest, and refresh our spirits, and spend time with those we love.
Walking in the woods is a way for me to do all of those things.

   When
we're hiking, Doyle and I don't talk much — we just walk, and think,
and try to absorb our surroundings. I stop often to shoot photos, and
he waits patiently while I kneel down to shoot a close-up of a red
leaf, or zoom in on a spiderweb shining in a late-afternoon sunbeam.

   At
one point in our walk Sunday, my husband wanted to venture off the
trail and go up a hill to the top of a ridge we could see through the
trees. He led the way, and I followed along, picking my way over fallen
limbs, crunching through dried leaves, using a springy branch for a
walking stick.
   When we got to the top, we discovered it wasn't a
bluff, as we'd thought, but just the crest of a hill that fell off
steeply on the other side. The view was lovely. Far away, across the
wooded valley, blue hills faded into the distance.
   On the hilltop, I
found myself standing under a little maple tree whose leaves were
painted in Christmas colors — bright greens and Santa-Claus reds. The
wind was shifting to the north, and the cheerful leaves were trembling
as they were blown upward like an old-fashioned lady's skirts.

Under that maple tree, I made a conscious effort to just feel, to soak in the experience.
   The
wind was fresh, almost cold. The late-afternoon sunshine was glowing
through the leaf canopy. The bright leaves were dancing over my head as
I looked up. The smell of the woods was of drying leaves, of north
wind, of both living wood and dying. All I could hear was rustling
leaves and the whoosh of the wind through a million trees. Red and gold
leaves let go of their twigs and floated free, like tiny kites released
by cheering children.
   We made our way back down the hill and found
the trail again. As we headed back to our car, the sun was low in the
sky, slanting through the woods, silhouetting the trees’ trunks and
branches as we looked to the west, and setting the leaves on fire.

“But now when the noon is no more, and riot is rest,
And the sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West,
And the slant yellow beam down the wood-aisle doth seem
Like a lane into heaven that leads from a dream ...”
That Georgia poet would’ve loved our Ozarks woods.

By Celia DeWoody
Copyright 2008 Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times
Published Oct. 29, 2008