For Shan Overton
1
It was the summer of 1950. In the Pocono Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania, a seminary student waited tables at one of the resorts that catered to the wealthy. He was the first in his family to go to college. He was trying to earn money for his education. He wanted to become a Moravian minister.
Partly from a sense of religious duty, partly from loneliness, and partly on a whim, he attended worship one Sunday morning in a rural Moravian congregation. Any young man would have stood out among the smattering of the faithful few.
But in addition to his youthful presence, this visitor belted out the hymns from the pews!
The volunteer choir director approached him after the service. She was twenty years his senior. Never married. A spinster, they called her. She invited the young man to choir practice that Wednesday evening. He found himself accepting her invitation out of duty, loneliness, and something else. This Ruth Bender had a certain warmth to her.
That evening, Ruth went home to the Bender family farm where she had been born and had never left. She informed her sister, Marion, also twenty years younger and just home that summer from Bible college, that she, too, was most cordially invited to choir practice that week. Wink, wink. Marion didn’t always mind her big sister, who had been more like a mother to her, but there was something about this invitation.
Eventually, Marion married that young man, Ray Troutman, who went on to serve as a Moravian minister to churches in Detroit, Orlando, Ohio, and Mount Airy, North Carolina—the town that was later made famous by hometown hero Andy Griffith as the fictionalized Mayberry. Marion became my grandmother. That first choir practice had a happily-ever-after, made-for-TV ending.
But that’s not the only story.
My Great Aunt Ruth died nine years before I was born. She lived her entire life in the same small town. My father remembers her as his favorite aunt. She would take him and his younger brothers to the resort for ice cream when they visited in the summer. Ruth worked in that resort, eventually rising to a supervisor.
My father also remembers how, at the end of their yearly visit, Aunt Ruth would follow his mother through the front door, down the porch steps, and to Ray’s station wagon idling in the driveway. As Dad watched from the backseat, Ruth leaned in the passenger window and kissed her baby sister goodbye on the cheek.
Marion would weep all the way down the mountain.
But I don’t believe she was unhappy with her life in North Carolina or any of the places she lived across the United States. Unlike many television sitcoms, even the best decisions in life often require sacrifice.
And I wonder if, as Ruth remained in the driveway, part of her wished that she was the one riding shotgun down the mountain.
2
When I think about questions of place and sacrifice, the fiction and poetry of Wendell Berry come to mind. In his latest short story collection, How It Went, Berry’s protagonist reflects upon a farm where he had lived and worked for the past five decades. Andy Catlett still catches himself thinking of the place by the name of the previous owner, for that is how he knew it as a child. Catlett often looks back on the pre-WW II farming economy and culture as a lost era, a time before machines and agribusiness. The message of many of these stories is that one cannot go home again, even if one never leaves the same place.
I realized in the course of writing this essay that I had been misquoting a Wendell Berry poem for years: “Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.” I had been exhorting others from the pulpit, as well as myself in my private thoughts, to “find” hope, as in the imperative to discover, to pay attention. Still, a good message.
Yet, “found” in this poem is not the past participle of “find.” Berry evokes a different imperative, meaning “begin, plan, establish.” Hope, then, becomes less of a treasure to be uncovered or a given (Emily Dickinson’s “thing with feathers that perches on the soul”), but the result of effort and work. As Berry put it elsewhere, “We join our work to heaven’s gift, our hope to what is left.”
Little is left of the pre-industrial society. It is estimated that we have sixty years of topsoil left in this country? What hope is left to us and future generations? In today’s world, what are we able to found, that is, to begin underneath our feet? What can we cultivate and create? Nourish and nurture and love?
To his credit, Berry’s fiction resists mere nostalgia, which one might argue was not the case for much of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. But Catlett comes to recognize that he does not own the land, but rather he belongs to it and to the people that have come before him. Berry refers to these people as “the membership.” Those who have instructed, in word and deed, a young person, and thereby helped form a child into an adult. The land is not Andy Catlett’s possession as much as he, Andy Catlett, knows who he is by knowledge of the land and of the people he has been a part of, the membership he has loved.
Recognizing that I can be a part of founding such belonging, such memberships in the place where I am, on the ground beneath my feet, gives me hope.
3
For years, I have known the story of how my paternal grandparents met. In the summer of 2023, I traveled to the Pocono Mountains to see some of it for myself. I told and retold the stories of our relatives to my children. And I intended to show them pieces of their family history. Though deer are now the only grazing animals on the land, we walked on the farm of my ancestors. Felt the ground under our feet. Also, made a campfire every night in the stone circle in the yard to roast (and torch) marshmallows.
We visited the resort where my Great Aunt Ruth worked and took my father. The original building is still here and, yes, they still serve ice cream. Also standing is the church where my grandparents first met …
Only now it is a Ukrainian Orthodox congregation. Above the somber stone building, built at the turn of the twentieth century, soars a new dome painted gold to mimic the Orthodox Church’s headquarters, St. Michael’s Monastery, in Kyiv. I drove my three young children to the church on a Saturday afternoon. I didn’t think to call ahead.
To my surprise, the parking lot was full. A bride stood outside the church doors with her father, waiting to enter the sanctuary and step into the future. I silently wished them well. We join our work to heaven’s gift, our hope to what is left.
As I pulled away in our minivan, I could hear singing through the open windows of the old building. Someone was belting out that hymn. That, too, gave me hope.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman serves as poet pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill, NC. His fourth book, Gently Between the Words, was published in 2019.