Evergreen 1960

When my parents were younger than my children are now,
and I was eight years older than Elena is now,
I met my future-husband at a summer revival at Evergreen,
where my daddy was the visiting song leader, and my parents the special music.

I was twelve, he was nineteen.  We bumped into each other over a bowl
of potato salad at the back door of his house.  He looked
at me and I looked away, but my fate took a turn that night.

Evergreen was a white, wooden church that
stood in a thick grove of trees down a long driveway off Macon Highway,
the quintessential little "church in the wildwood."
The same people came every night--farmers and shirt factory people
and often they invited us to dinners at their houses.

Evergreen--now with fewer trees

Those women cooked the best food you ever tasted--
Pies and cakes, fried chicken, butterbeans, relishes, iced tea and biscuits.
One night, I overheard my future-husband's mother
say to mine, "My son thinks your daughter looks like an angel."

That's when we all should have said "Ugh oh!"
But no.  We fell in love.  Six years later we had the wedding, the whole nine yards,
then we moved to Texas.

Some nights, Grace, the regular piano player, couldn't play,
so I played the old beat up, out-of-tune piano with the cracked yellowed keys.

The people sang wholeheartedly,
way louder than we sang downtown at our stained-glass-windowed,
air-conditioned, carpeted church.

From the piano bench, I watched cardboard
fans--with Jesus knocking on one side and ads for Fisher Funeral Home on the other--
fanning hard to the rhythm of the music, stirring the humid soup of air.

The visiting preacher was fired up to save souls and
you couldn't doze off if you tried.
Sweat dripping all over his face and through his shirt,
he moved around and waved his arms and told one scary story after the other.
(Hell wasn't mentioned all that much in our regular church, and I was captivated.)

Turns out everybody was already saved, but by the end of the sermon,
even the saved ones wanted to up the ante.  One by one, people walked the aisle
and whispered words in the preacher's ear, and he patted their shoulders, gratified.

Some cried.  One woman in a brown dress--with a whole row of children--wept every night.
All these decades later, I wonder--what must have been going on in her house?

I played "Just As I Am"over and over,
eleven verses, twelve, seventeen, as many as it took.

"Somebody's a-dyin!  Somebody's a-dyin!" the preacher shouted,
"Somebody's a-goin-to Heaven, somebody's a-goin-to Hell!"
hoping to get the last few reluctant souls to move on up front
and accept the invitation to eternal life.

I used to think time was running out faster at Evergreen than any other place I knew.
There we all were, sitting right on the brink of E-ternity, Brethren,
and death could snatch us at any minute.