Miss Ingu Reflects on Yesterday

Yesterday at Mass the opening song was "Shall We Gather At The River". I haven't heard that one in a long time. It transported me back through the ages to a time of sparkling innocence. I promise to avoid too many of these memories in this blog. They are probably a wee too maudlin for general consumption. Anyway, the year was 1967 in late May. I was spending a couple weeks in Eastern Kentucky between Beauty and Lovely near the West Virginia border with a group I belonged to, Volunteers in Appalachia. We had spent the week picking strawberries and had just finished wallpapering a woman's kitchen using flour and water for wallpaper paste. I'd also driven out along the hollers with the clinic nurses to make a few home visits. Near the end of my stay, unexpectedly, my 1st true love drove down to offer me a ride back to Cincinnati and also to tell me something of great import. He showed up as we were finishing the wallpaper job and were all covered in flour glue and bits of old newspaper. I had a gooey feeling in the pit of my stomach. The "important thing" had to wait until the next morning when we could climb the mountain across Wolf Creek. It was "our" mountain, having climbed it earlier in the winter of that year. I wasn't comfortable with this guy showing up because my plan was to enter the convent that fall, and I knew I better tell him soon. On the mountain, after a you-go-first...no-you-go-first period of stalling, he confessed his love to me and I confessed the convent. He proposed, then hesitantly promised to marry me if I left the convent. Hesitantly because a question of his fear of interfering with God's plan came up. It was one of those "The Hills are Alive..." bittersweet moments. We were quiet as we climbed down the mountain. Nearing the bottom we could hear soft singing. Through a clearing we saw a baptism going on in the creek and stopped to watch. They were singing "As We Gather At The River". *Addendum* Sixteen years later we drove out to see our mountain once again and it had been completely plowed down by a strip mining company! He left the next month.