This Is The Place

Forty-two years were the longest I had settled in one location. Children went from pre-schoolers to off to college to marriage with Rice Blvd. as a starting place. The time had come for a move. I still needed my circle space that I knew and loved. Instructions to the realtor: Near my church and my grocery store. I don’t want to cross Holcombe Blvd. to the south or Alabama to the north and the new place has to be one story. The Doll House on Swift fit all the criteria. I added a school in which to volunteer to the triangle. GPS helps me leave the beaten path, yet I always stay in the city limits.

Then Doug and I took a road trip Saturday to Lafayette, Louisiana. We went to a memorial service for the husband of a couple that had been on the close friend list for 66 years. Be impressed. Road work app gave the suggestion that travel would be easier on old 90 rather than the interstate. That change opened up a whole vista of memories. We lived out that highway in Dayton, Texas, for five years. David called it Gracious Country Living – not sure that was the best descriptive. Almost to the Louisiana border we stopped at a light at Barber’s Hill where I once slammed on brakes, and Doug, age three and standing in the back seat, came over and cut his forehead. He has a scar, yet we haven’t thought of that day in ages. The place brought it to mind.

The drive wasn’t just names of towns. It also was the change in trees that grew along the highway. Some swamp to the right and pines lining the north side. I looked out of the front windshield and suddenly was in Baton Rouge. The sky was a brilliant blue with puffy white cumulus summer clouds. I could have been crossing the quadrangle at LSU in mid_summer. That square is defined by brick buildings with tiled roofs. My daddy walked that space a generation before me. I hummed a line of “Where stately oaks and broad magnolias shade inspiring walls….FOREVER L-S-U.

On to Lafayette. For years my friends’ home was a good stopping place on the Hammond to Houston run. I saw adult children whom I last remembered sitting around my dining room table as teens. We recalled our times together at the Colosseum in Rome, and someone kissing the Blarney Stone (not me). These places defined specifics in our journey together. I can’t give credit; however one of my copied gems is “The sense of place is where memories are summoned, so that a sound or a scent or the way the wind blows brings a remembrance of what has happened and why.” The phrase for that day was amazement in saying with clarity, “This is the place where….” The places of the past are only a prelude to those around the bend.

I go to prepare a place for you. John 14:2