The Town on the Hill

Many years ago a young man left his family’s impoverished farm in Arkansas to seek opportunity out west. He found it as a mechanic in Carlsbad, New Mexico. He married and had three sons and a daughter. When he lost his wife to illness, he began a correspondence with a schoolteacher close to his age back in Arkansas. She moved out to New Mexico and married him. They had a daughter together. She would one day become my mother.

Every summer Mom and her mother would go to visit her mother’s family in Arkansas. Many of Mom’s best childhood memories are of these summer visits. She would spend the night at her grandmother’s house, visit her aunt and uncle, climb trees, play pinball (she got upset when someone tried to tell her that this was a form of gambling), and visited with “Aunt Eller”, an old woman who hung out at the general store. When Mom graduated high school she attended college in Arkansas, where she met Dad. So Mom went from visiting Arkansas to becoming an Arkansan herself. Ironically after her parents died she stopped her visits to the little town in northern Arkansas where she so liked going as a girl.

By the time I was in college Mom had not been there in many years. One summer I and one of our church members, a woman who liked traveling and had been all over the state, accompanied Mom on a visit there. She did not know what to expect. I did not either.

I had never seen anything that looked quite like that town. The heart of the little community clustered around a steep hill. What might be called the main street ran along the base of the hill. Several retailers (mostly now closed), a little post office, and a small lodge hall with Masonic symbols on its sign sat side by side with their backs to the hill. There were houses scattered on the slopes above them. A church crowned the hill.

One of the houses sat off to the side, on a kind of lower spur of the hill. Mom recognized it as the house her grandmother had lived in. There were still people living in it; from the look of things they had children. For some reason we did not try to say hello at the house. I don’t recall whether this was because there was nobody home.

Since this was a rural settlement the cluster on the hill did not make up the whole community. We drove around the environs for a while. Soon Mom began to recognize places. She saw her aunt and uncle’s house. It too appeared to be still inhabited. We also found the shell of the little country school where her mother had taught in her maiden days. It looked as if a farmer had been storing hay in it.

At one point we stopped at a cemetery where several members of the family had been buried. Her aunt and uncle’s graves were there. Nearby we found a small stone to a child who had died at birth. Mom had never heard anyone mention this infant cousin.

There were still people around who remembered Mom’s mother. We met two ladies in particular, one in her eighties, the other about ten years older, who had known her well. It has been so long now that I don’t recall much that they had to say. Mainly I recall how thrilled Mom was to speak to them. She asked them questions and carefully caught every word. I think that Mom learned quite a bit that day. I was happy for her.