Fidelity (The Return)

 

We finally made it to Fidelity after our previous disastrous attempt in July 2019, in which I got stuck in the mud just west of Bittersweet Road, tore off our van's bumper, and had to walk to Highway 75 in flip flops and jeans over the gravel roads. 

But, as I said, we finally made it! St. Augustine's Church is lovely, and the graveyard across the street was full of flags in preparation for Memorial Day.

The fields in the surrounding countryside were full of old cornstalks cut short in last fall's harvest. The day was cloudy, but sharp shafts of sunlight blazed down through gaps in the clouds. 

We explored the cemetery, pausing at tombstones that caught our interest. We were especially saddened by the ones where babies were buried - young lives snuffed out by disease long before their old age. Lila Wiltz was one such: She lived from 1919 to 1920. Another tombstone proclaimed simply, "Bakers Infants, 1941-1941." So much heartache expressed in so few characters carved into stone!

As we were wandering through the graveyard, we noticed that a lady had come out onto the porch of a neighboring home. It was Mrs. Meyer, who lives in the old "Sister House" across the street from the church. She has lived alone there for the past three years since being widowed. She was wondering if we wanted to look around inside the building; she had the key.

We definitely wanted to look inside, and so we took her up on her offer. Within the church, we could feel and smell the age of the place. The wooden fixtures had the fine patina that only generations of hands can lend. The walls had pictures of the nuns who had served the people of this community as teachers before living out their twilight years in the Sister House.

It was a good way to spend Memorial Day, when we remember the people we have loved and lost, but also when we remember our own coming deaths. This little town -- what's left of it, anyway -- definitely has the feeling of a place that is dying, and so it led our hearts to consider our own mortality, as well as what lies on the Other Side.