To Bring You Back to Where You Always Were

Just north of Troy, Tennessee, tucked behind rolling hills and among towering shade trees is a homestead.

It’s been part of my dad’s family’s legacy for over 50 years. Aunt Sharon still lives there, keeping the place warm with her heart and a little help with the sunrises that sneak onto her front porch, quietly stealing long moments on the swing before playfully skipping off to explore the day ahead.

As I write, it’s been eighteen and a half years since her husband and my dad’s brother, our Uncle Norris, passed away. Still, she has kept her home her own, opening it up to her family and friends across the years. And surely, she savors quiet nights too, keeping company with the echos of laughter and the commotion that sweet memories of family gatherings still bring.

Sometime in 2000, a tornado touched down right on their property! It looked like a war zone for all the debris! Thankfully, their home wasn’t severely damaged.

But there was a great loss, suddenly and unexpectedly with those winds. Four tall beech trees that towered over the north end of their property were obliterated.

There had been sentimental value within them – somewhat literally. Many years earlier, my dad had carved names in three of them: “DAVID,” “JIMMY”, and “LORI.” Eventually, my name was added to the fourth tree, “JOEY.” Uncle Norris added that with his pocket knife during a visit I made in the summer of 1987, and its a treasured memory for me.

Those trees were special, not merely because of our names, but because of the character they brought to the land, to that homestead. I last saw them standing tall, rocking in a gentle springtime breeze in 1989. Sadly, the next time I saw this homestead, it was without the trees, shortly after we moved to Tennessee in the spring of 2004. And the occasion? My Uncle Norris passed away in August that year, the first of my dad’s siblings to pass.

Mingled with the sorrow at his wake was how the surreal change in the lay of the land made me feel. So many trees were gone, but especially those towering beeches. My sadness was deepened over what seemed like forever keepsakes anchored deep in the soil had been taken from us.

The way the landscape now rolled was different; it felt larger.

The way the sunlight fell changed; it seemed richer.

The way the wind blew was unfamiliar; it felt freer.

And it was all still so beautiful. All because of a random storm – and what uncle Norris, aunt Sharon, neighbors and kin did to redeem this homestead from the calamity.

On that beautiful, hot August day in 2004, after we had paid tribute and respects to our dear uncle, we all gathered at his and aunt Sharon’s place. My parents, two brothers and sister were able to drive from Michigan, the first – and next to final time – we’d all “come home to Tennessee” together. I knew it’d be a very hard time for my dad, losing his younger brother too soon.

Aug. 21, 2004. L to R, F to B: Sonya, Aunt Linda, Aunt Della, Aunt Josephine; Jim, me, Lori, Mom, Dad, Aunt Sarah, Vicky; John, Debbie, Mark, Beverly, Billy David, Billy Joe; missed having Aunt Sharon, Donna, Aunt Sam, Kevin, Uncle Terry, Jennifer, Jeff, and Brian. Taken just behind Norris and Sharon’s house.

And for my big brother, Billy David, I knew it’d be about as hard for him, perhaps in some ways, more so.

Dave had a special bond with uncle Norris, and of course, with aunt Sharon, their daughter Donna and their place. Donna was perhaps the cousin he was closest to (and that’s saying something: We’ve had 32 cousins across two families). I don’t know how many summers David spent in Tennessee in his youth. He spun tall tales of going coon hunting in the night with Norris and listening to our uncle’s countless stories. Oh, how uncle Norris had this craft ingrained in his character! Dave must’ve heard many a story from him as he, too, eventually found his own voice in storytelling.

Whenever we went to visit dad’s seven siblings and their families in Troy and Union City, David would often find some way to get out to this homestead and stay there most of the time. I recall a big, traditional family gathering we had one year down at Boyette’s Restaurant at Reelfoot Lake. After arriving with Norris, Sharon and Donna and walking up to our waiting tribe, my brother Jim wryly told him, “Dave I, can’t tell you how good it is to see you after all this time, mainly because… that would be a lie.” Banter aside, we knew then how special it was for him to spend time there.

There’s something about place.

Places do something to us, sometimes like a conductor before an orchestra commanding emotions to crescendo and fade within us. Sometimes, like that deeply special friend whom you often don’t get to see, the one who still adores you, listens to you and – no matter what – is just. so. glad. you’re. there. Right there. All but insisting you belong,.. almost trying to keep you from leaving.

How is it that place, a familiar place, can stir the past in painfully beautiful – yet delightful lonely ways? How does a place make us face such contradictions and accept them with little to no resistance? Perhaps, simply, because it is there, and we’re right there with it; nothing to explain or resolve…

Just be.
Be here.

Taking us back as if we’d never left; bringing us back to where we always were.

In the early summer of 2021 my big brother texted me from another country homestead, this one in rural south central Michigan where he and his bride Stephanie have lived many years. This place is special, too, stirring in me familiar feelings of a certain place near Troy, Tennessee. I was working from home in Murfreesboro, about 3 hours east of Troy and 10 hours south him. He asked if I could come and get him, take him back to see our kin, and bring him home.

After all, it had been 15 years since he was there last. We had fewer aunts and uncles there, a few cousins moved away, and neither of us getting younger. I offered to take him if he could at least fly to Nashville or even take a bus to Union City. He never really responded and let it go. David always felt things deeply, so I have to believe many of these thoughts might resonate with him.

Then there was a great loss, suddenly and unexpectedly, when he passed away after Labor Day that same year. None of us suspected he was going to be gone so soon. Even so, his final moments were standing on his own front porch facing the east as the sunrise illuminated towering trees around him.

Today, we celebrate his 65th birthday, missing him. And while after all these years I cannot comprehend neither the depth of God’s love or the vastness of His grace, I can and do believe my brother and his faith were precious to Him.

Grief is revisited time and again, not unlike going back to those warm, familiar places from my youth. The way the landscape of mourning rolls, always different, somehow deeper. The way the light of consolation falls changes, somehow more revealing. The way the winds of change shift is mystical, somehow liberating. Always dissettling, as if my will is being washed with some intangible infinite wisdom, and yet always right.

Over Thanksgiving weekend in November of 2022, I returned to this homestead just north of Troy, meeting my aunt Sharon and my cousin Donna for a sweet, stirring visit. Sunset was sauntering off, warmly so, in the west behind the homestead, giving lingering moments of silhouetted trees before quietly slipping off to elude the dusk just behind.

Donna and I left the comfort of Sharon’s kitchen, walking over to the north side of the property near where those four towering trees once stood. And there, another tree about 10 or so years along stood waiting, not very tall, but ready to do life. We stood in the cold as twilight yielded to the mercury lamp humming atop a nearby post.

I said a prayer.
Thanking God for Sharon, Norris, and Donna. For my family.

And, for my big brother, Dave.

For every moment that was lived among us.
Especially here, at this homestead.

This place.

A patch of ground not far from where those trees once stood… where he and his uncle spent countless hours telling stories and hunting… where cookouts and ballgames were played… below the dormant branches of a young tree, I knelt and swept away a few leaves from its base.

Then left what I had of my brother’s ashes there.

Perhaps, symbolically, to fulfill his wish of being brought back to this place, to this homestead.

Or maybe, really, to avow that he was always still there, anyway…

Postscript…

As I left Aunt Sharon’s homestead that night, I drove up the road just a piece, pulled up into the driveway of closed rural pole barn, and spent a while taking in the view above…

A waxing moon. A new phase of a constant journey.
A sunset that could just as easily be perceived as a dawn…