Prologue for a Summer Day

I grew up in a mining town, the same town my mother was born in. My dad worked for more than 30 years for one of the local mining companies; he wasn’t a miner, but a mechanic. He worked on the huge ore trucks that hauled the ore from the mines to the processing plant. He didn’t know then that this job would ultimately result in his death;  years later he developed mesothelioma, a type of lung cancer caused by repeated exposure to the asbestos in the brake linings of those trucks.

I attended the same school that my mom had attended; the town had by then dwindled to only a handful of houses, but at its height it was a place to behold. During its heyday, there was a movie theater, a hospital, a company store and barber shop, tennis courts, and a beautiful community center that was used by the town for community activities. My mom used to tell us that the company provided pots of hot soup there for anyone to eat at noon every day. She would run the half mile from school to eat a bowl of soup, then run back to school before the bell rang. When I was young, I attended Brownie scout meetings there; in high school, this beautiful old place was the site of many of our homecoming dances and proms.

The playground at our elementary school had sidewalks and front steps that led to nowhere, just empty spaces where the houses once stood. My mom talked about the different neighborhoods that bore names like Crumbiatown, Mexico Camp, and Little Italy. The landscape around the area was dotted with pools of iridescent blue-green water, where the ore had been mined. Several of my brave classmates swam in them, but some of those mining pits were rumored to be bottomless; sadly, some of my classmates also drowned in them.

For a small rural school, the teachers were excellent, and the requirements were tough. I was voted "Wittiest" and "Most Studious" by my classmates. The wittiest title I understood; my mouth always worked faster than my brain. The studious title I just secretly laughed at. Although I graduated as valedictorian from my high school, I was not one to study. Learning came easy to me, a skill that would also serve me well in college. I played saxophone in the band, and marched at the football games on Friday nights.

(That’s me, almost exact center, holding my saxophone. My best friend Catherine is on the first row, 5th from the right; she played clarinet.)

(That’s me, right bottom row, second from left; My friend Catherine and I designed this photo layout, and we made the rows into "smiles" rather than straight lines. We also had a very strategic reason for placing people the way we did, so this picture always makes me laugh!)

This past weekend, some of my family and I took a trip to the museum that is now housed in that beautiful old community center. When I stepped inside the cool interior, I was instantly transported 50 years back in time; I could so clearly remember coming through those massive doors after school on Thursdays, tiptoeing across the huge floor to the side room where our Brownie meetings were held. I could almost hear the music and smell the flowers from those long-ago proms. I could imagine my mother’s little feet running across the grass and pounding up the steps, her mouth watering as she smelled that delicious soup; not even thinking about the half mile run back to school. This is the past that I come from; this is the legacy that I have.

We spent the better part of the afternoon there, laughing and remininiscing about times gone by. My life has moved on; my heavenly Father has led me in a different direction and placed me in a different town. He has ordered my steps, and directed me to who and where I am today. But my roots remain in that quaint little mining town where I spent the first 17 years of my life.

(From left: me, with Sissy, Summer and Emmi in front of me; my brother Todd with his daughter Amelia, my brother Alan with his wife Diana and their son Zak.)