Antique Wagon Repair--and the Simple Act of Remembering--Together

My friend Luellen paused in the middle of our weeding along the stone path through her front flower garden late this morning.

"I'm going to take a break now," she said. "I am going to take flowers to the cemetery. It's where my first husband is buried. Would you like to come along?" 

Suddenly, I realized it was Memorial Day weekend. I had never taken flowers to a grave before.

"I'd love to!" I said. "I love cemeteries! I know I'm kind of weird..."

But weird or not, Luellen was tickled. 

She went into the house to retrieve her bag of flowers while I picked up my gallon ziploc baggie of fresh lambs quarters "weeds" we had saved while weeding in her flower garden.

"I like to munch lambs quarters," Luellen had told me, and she offered me a plant.

I tried it. 

Not too bad! I decided to save some and add to our borsch or stir fried rice.   

On our way to her car to go to the cemetery, I snapped a photo of Timmy working there. 

Duane fell a couple years ago and hasn't fully recuperated. He can barely hobble around, though he gets around in a dandy way on his gator, today with Timmy riding around beside him! 

I had gone along with Timmy to Duane and Luellen's ranch this morning, because Duane wanted Timmy to bring his own milled lumber to repair an antique wagon they had, 

and they also wanted to buy one of my books.)  

Luellen and I got into her old red car and drove about two miles down the dirt road to Antioch Cemetery, out in the middle of the prairie. 

Luellen began pulling the tumbleweed starts in front of her first husband's grave and telling me about him. She and he were dreaming of starting a farm and were studying agriculture, when one day about age 50, he was out with the baby peacocks they were raising, and she called to him. He seemed to be on his side looking under a wagon for the peacock chicks, but he did not respond. He had had a heart attack, and could not be revived.

 Luellen told me how some years later, Duane and she, both teachers in the area, met, and they dated for a while and married.

Now today, as I helped her pull out the old, faded flowers she had placed there last year, and then poke the stems of the new red, white, and blue flowers into the ground, she told me that she usually likes to  pray at the gravestone.

I told her I would love to join her. With our arms around each other, she prayed a simple prayer, thanking the Lord for all the years He had given her with her first husband, and then thanking Him

for bringing Duane into her life. Then she thanked God that someday soon we will all be together in Heaven.

She did not have to be alone at that grave site this time.  

Someone valued the simple act of remembering.

I noted how many gravestones there had windmills engraved on them. 

"Windmills were our source of water for so many years," Luellen observed. 

It is no wonder windmills were engraved on gravestones--a western symbol of eternal life.

We chuckled over the name that is pronounced like "geek."

She said there were many Giecks in the area. 

Luellen knew several of the people buried there, and briefly told me their stories.

I love the stories behind people's names.

Every one of them is valuable to God. 

Just like Duane and Luellen.

This elderly couple started befriending us a few years ago when we dropped into the remodeled barn where an evangelical fellowship was meeting for worship. Duane and Luellen are country people who like traditional music, God's Word, and both love to pray for and support the persecuted Christians. 

And they value history and the stories of those who have gone before.

(I wondered if this Berg was any relation to my maternal German grandmother, who was Anne Lois Berg before she married a Morgan of Welsh ancestry.) Luellen said there were many buried there who died from the Spanish Influenza in 1918. In fact, she took me a few miles down the road to see Antioch Community Church which used to be Tructon Schoolhouse, built in 1916. Only a couple years after it was built, it was turned into a temporary hospital for Spanish Flu victims. 

 Hospital equipment was trucked out and three nurses were stationed there. It was a very sad year in the area, saddened by World War I besides the deaths from Spanish influenza.

 Now a small group meets here on Sundays.

So much rich history here.

Luellen told me how school children many years ago planted these trees out front, and carried water in buckets out to water them. 

Duane was entranced with something I had written in my last newsletter, about the "Farm" venue for the ladies retreat in South Dakota, run by a grandfather of German Russian ancestry. 

"I wonder if I am related to this grandfather," Duane told me. "I also was raised in southeastern South Dakota, in a Mennonite family of German Russian ancestry."

In fact, today Duane showed me a circle on a map of Ukraine, the area where his ancestors grew up.

Duane's family moved down here where other friends had been homesteading near Vona, CO.  Men folks had come and staked claims about the time of the Homestead Act, but by the time they brought their families back from South Dakota area, other people had taken the homesteads. So they settled elsewhere in the area. 

Duane loaned me a book that the Tructon Ladies' Society put together about the history of the Tructon area where Esareys live--about 45 minutes from us.

It means a lot to Duane and Luellen to have someone value their ancestry. He and a few others try to keep a church up a couple hours away, that used to be Mennonite, but no one worships there anymore, just some of the relatives get together every once in a while to have a service--something like Egg Hill Church that my brother Gabriel's church has a service in once a year in Pennsylvania.

 Duane gave his heart to Jesus at 5 or 6 years old in the upstairs Sunday School room of that old church near Vona.

  I told Duane I'd love for our family to join them sometime at that church, maybe bring some music.

We'll see.

Until then, it is just pleasant to remember--together.