November 29, 2008

• Our own little piece of God's country

      Writing
  about gratitude is a good and healthy exercise for me (and I suspect
  for most of us), making me discipline my mind and point it toward the
  things I have to be grateful for, rather than letting my thoughts run
  in frenzied circles on its hamster wheel, hollering, “I have so much to
  do and not enough time to do it in!”
  

     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.
  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  • 9:44 am
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