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When I have moments of homesickness, my mind turns to a quieter place, a quieter time. Mama says it really was not a quieter time. I was a child, and I knew nothing about the anxieties of my mother and my aunts. They had returned from distant cities to my grandmother’s home to wait out the war and hope for the good news that my dad and my uncles would be coming home.
That waiting place, the family gathering place, was my hometown where my mother's family lived in town and my dad's, in the country. It was my birthplace. The only time the population ever boomed there was when these women, and others like them with their children, returned to wait for the men. In my heart, though, it will always be home.
Life was planned before birth in that town. Just as sure as your mother washed clothes on Monday, the stores would be closed Wednesday afternoon; and on Saturday afternoon everyone would come to town in farm trucks and stand around visiting on the sidewalk while eating boiled peanuts. On Sunday, the three preachers in town would preach to three different full houses. If someone died, the neighbors sat up all night with the casket and grieving family. During those times, we kids played outside, and at frequent intervals some sorrowing adult would put on a stiff upper lip, come out and carry us to the restroom which was outback and down the lane. There, they answered all our questions about death and dying. I think the adults had agreed to tell their children that it was green pecans causing all those deaths. I have never eaten green pecans.
Funerals brought the three preachers and their flocks together. Otherwise, there was an ongoing debate among the three groups. My grandfather irritated these “sectarians” as he called them in his Saturday afternoon challenges in front of the post office. The Florida East Coast Baptist and the Seaboard Baptist were each named for the railroad which ran in front of its building. They had been united in earlier years, but some difference of opinion had divided the brethren. Granddaddy did not let them forget it either. It was the cross they had to bear. There was a Sunday that the preachers from these two factions agreed to preach on reconciliation which they did. They were dynamic lessons but, alas, the trains were off schedule that morning so hardly anyone heard anything but chugging and whistling.
The size of my hometown can be summed up in two city blocks, and life pulsated from there. The message which came from that nerve center early one morning was the one for which the adults had prayed. It, and others, signaled an end of the war and a way of life. My sister, cousins, and I were playing on the front porch when a neighbor raced breathlessly across our lawn calling to my Aunt Ann, “Ann, Grover is at the bus station?” Close behind that neighbor was my handsome uncle in his military uniform, carrying the weight of his heavy duffel bags. That was a sight that was etched on my memory for life.
We were back last summer for the family reunion. I looked for the innocence of the small town of long-ago days, and just as I thought it was lost forever in the nether gloom that holds the excitement of birthdays, Christmas mornings, Santa Claus and merry-go-rounds, I heard a bright-eyed nephew asking his dad for a bag of boiled peanuts.
Homesickness has been a bane to many who leave home to start life elsewhere. The children of Israel were captured by King Nebuchadnezzar and moved from their homes and temple worship in Jerusalem (Zion) to Babylon. Their captors taunted them in their sad state and said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
The heartbroken Israelites responded, “How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? There by the rivers of Babylon they sat and wept and hung their harps on the willow trees as they remembered Zion.
Ecclesiastes 7:3 is a reminder that sadness can produce an awareness of what is really important in our lives, and Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 points out a time for everything. We will do well to reflect on life’s changes and seek wisdom in our observations.
See the menu for Bible Stories, Lessons #22 and #23 for background of the Babylonian captivity.