Saturday, November 27, 2021

Thanksgiving 2021

I  hope everyone out there had a relaxing and enjoyable Thanksgiving. We certainly did. The weather was perfect, sunny and cold being ideal conditions for thankfulness. All of our kids made it home without incident, and the dogs were especially delightful and well behaved. The 48 hours began on Wednesday evening around 6:30 when the kids arrived safe and sound and found this waiting for them…



There was homemade potato soup with ham and Swiss cheese sliders, then an evening of getting the pups settled down.

Thanksgiving morning dawned clear and bright and since the big meal was to be at my sister Linda’s house at 1:00, Pam opted for a relatively light breakfast featuring little sausages covered with cheese in some sort of flaky pastry shell baked in the oven until golden brown, along with an entire package of bacon. Unfortunately, everyone was so busy wolfing them down, nobody paused long enough to take a picture.

Arriving at Linda’s on time was made impossible because of yet another Least Valuable Vacationer performance by my eldest child, Kaitlin. Pam had just taken her butternut squash salad thing out of the oven and was ready to add the cup of diced walnuts to the mix when she discovered that the nuts were nowhere to be found. In a panic, she exclaimed, “Oh my Gosh, what happened to the nuts?!” That’s when Kaitlin sauntered up, “Oh? I used those for my apple cranberry casserole. I assumed that you had chopped them up just for me, and by the way, that was very sweet of you…” The dictionary definition of First Child Privilege on display.

Our time at Linda’s was wonderful. Although we missed Sean, Lauren and Kat, everyone had a great time eating and talking and eating some more. Then it was outside for our annual batting practice whereby all the kids in the family get to test their hitting skills against the whiffle ball mastery of yours truly…


Then everyone got a turn on the Zip Line of Death…


My daughter in law, Sarah, won the event by somehow managing to ride the thing while wearing a skirt!

After four hours or so of that, we all loaded up in the car and headed back to Short Pump to perambulate the dogs. Then it was over to Russ and Vi’s for dessert and conversation. By the time our heads hit the pillow, we were all bone tired, but happy.

The day after Thanksgiving, tragically known as Black Friday in my country, was celebrated in a counter-cultural way in the Dunnevant home by taking a three dog walk at Deep Run Park…


Then the girls were off for some kind of craft thing where they did crafty things all afternoon…







Meanwhile, the guys made absolutely nothing, but did manage to solve the problems of the world over beers at Capital Ale House, where no power tools were used and no pictures taken. Then it was out for a delicious dinner at West Coast Provisions. The only thing left to do was have hot chocolate around a fire on the deck after the grand illumination. The Pups were not thrilled that they were left out…





Then, as a bonus, the newlyweds showed up!!



So, all in all, another fabulous Thanksgiving. Hope your’s was too.





Wednesday, November 24, 2021

Thanksgiving? How About an Airing of Grievances Instead?

I suppose I should blame it on my Mom, my contrarian streak. It always seems to come at inconvenient times. For example, this time of year when everybody is talking about how thankful they are for this or that, I feel overcome with the desire to write a Festivus-style airing of grievances post. Its mostly little things, but still irritating annoyances. So, if you’re here looking for one of those Ten Things I’m Thankful For posts, you’ve come to the wrong place. Here goes…

1. I’m increasingly annoyed by the ubiquitous overuse of the F-word. Look, I’m known for my occasional salty language, believing as I do that profanity, properly understood and used, is a unique and effective form of communication. But, the F-word has become the…like…of popular discourse, and because of this, it has lost its meaning altogether. It appears in even the most benign communications in every imaginable part of speech, verb, noun, adjective, adverb. It’s ridiculous. Note to the worst offenders — if you think using the word is shocking, that train left the station a decade ago. It just makes you look boring and uneducated.

2. 


Why is it that every single time I encounter a worksite that features a giant hole in the ground, there are always 1-2 workers down in the hole actually working and 6-8 guys standing around watching them work, hands folded or jammed in pockets, big smiles on their faces? I mean…every single time. And this photograph doesn’t even show the dude sitting in the cab of that backhoe reading the newspaper.

3. It continues to both astonish and annoy me that people in this country look at the same political figure and see wildly different things. My son, a liberal, is supremely disappointed in Joe Biden for essentially going back on most of his campaign promises and governing like a Republican (the deportations continue, no student debt cancellation, no raising the minimum wage, flip flopping on off shore oil leases, etc,..etc), while many of my conservative friends are convinced that Joe Biden is in the grips of the radical left of his party, a veritable pawn of international Socialism. This is what happens when nobody trusts the media and out of frustration, retreats to like-minded social media platforms dominated by partisans. Alternative universes emerge that drive our narrative, neither of which can be trusted. 

4. Nobody understands supply and demand, the laws of scarcity and abundance better than me…but this is opportunistic bull-s**t.



What? You expect me to believe that somehow COVID has stunted the growth of the Christmas tree crop? The supply chain problems off the coast of California have somehow shrunk the supply of Frazier Firs? Are truck drivers suddenly refusing to ship trees down 95 because of the higher cost of fuel? Or…is this just a money grab by greedy grifters taking advantage of people who read articles like THIS…

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.denverpost.com/2021/11/21/pay-more-christmas-trees/amp/ “Expect higher prices” all you want. I say, refuse to pay!

I simply refused to be scammed, picking up a six foot beauty at Food Lion for $50.

5. I’m done with people who drive minivans into crowds of people. I have no interest in examining root causes. I couldn’t care less about what race the driver is or the race of his victims. I say, bring back public hangings for these maniacs.

6. And now…yet another “high profile trial of the century” has the country sitting on the edge of our seats, this time in Georgia. We all wait around for the verdict, then the rioting aftermath to come. No matter the outcome, my Facebook feed will be filled with F-BOMB outrage by people who set through exactly zero of the testimony, examined none of the physical evidence and only heard journalist’s summations of the proceedings, yet can tell you for a fact that the jurors were all idiots, the judge bought off and the defense council (or prosecutors) incompetent. 


There.

I feel better already!


Tuesday, November 23, 2021

If I Were a Betting Man…

In less than an hour, the County of Henrico will turn off the water to our neighborhood. Apparently there is a faulty valve that must be repaired. All of us received this handy doorknob notice a few days ago…


The most troubling portion of this communication, of course, is the disconcerting phrase…we hope to…right before the estimated resumption of service time. Not to pick on the County, but my dealings with the various levels of government during my 6 plus decades on this planet have not been characterized by adjectives such as timely or dependable. So, you’ll have to excuse me if my mind has gone to dark places when contemplating this day.


Of course, the difference between me and my wife is that instead of sitting around dreaming up worst case scenarios, she simply sent an unbelievably nice and polite email to the Henrico County Department of Public Utilities, Construction Division to register her concerns of what this water interruption might mean for families expected Thanksgiving visitors and whatnot, asking the question on everyone’s mind, “Is there anyway this could possibly be rescheduled until the week after Thanksgiving?”

I have always believed that my wife is the kindest person I know, and nowhere is this kindness displayed more vividly than in her written communications. She has an amazing talent for making even the most contentious subjects sound completely benign. She could make an eviction letter sound like an invitation to tea! Anyway, she sends this email and in less than an hour she gets a telephone call from none other than Zuzanna Lesniak, the utilities inspector for this project. Ms. Lesniak could not have been any nicer. She explained the emergency nature of the work, that it could not be postponed to next week, and assured her that every attempt will be made to do the needed repair as expediently as possible. Then they chatted about their plans for Thanksgiving and made plans to get coffee next week. (Just kidding), but if they had it would not have surprised me.

So, we are about to find out what the word “expedient” means when it is used by Utilities Inspectors who work for Henrico County. We will discover whether or not their “hope” in a 3:00 pm completion time was justified.

In the meantime, I’ve got 24 minutes left to brush my teeth. 




Monday, November 22, 2021

Pumping the Brakes

A special blog by Author and friend, Tom Allen.




I missed a holiday celebration not long ago, and I seem to be the only one who wasn’t told about the special occasion. One recent Tuesday was evidently National Pull Out in Front of Tom Day, and numerous people-in-the-know enthusiastically observed it during my morning commute.

As I headed downtown, several drivers decided that there was easily enough clearance in front of me to mosey out of their side streets into my laneseemingly oblivious to the screech of my brakes. It was so unreasonable the first time or two that I had to laugh, but I actually ended up pretty close to fuming by the time I got to the office.

It brought back visions of another equally lovely day further back when attempted to grab a few bucks from an ATM. There was only one car ahead of me, and the woman driving seemed to have the hang of the whole computerized process because as I pulled in behind her, I heard lots of beeps as she diligently tapped the screen. The ATM then spit her card back out, and I prepared for her to move on. 


Instead, she re-inserted the card and started tapping again. This process repeated itselfseveral times as a few minutes crawled by: a long series of beeps and the reappearance of her card. As I began a short deep breathing exerciseshe literally got out of her car, walked around in front of mine, opened her trunk, and spent a couple more minutes rummaging around in it for something. I couldn’t believe it.

hit the gas, pulled around her and bolted.

Why the dramatic jump in blood pressure on both those days? Was there really somewhere so important I needed to be that I just couldn’t abide the interesting driving and ATM habits of my fellow humans? What, exactly, was the rush?

I seem to have acquired a need for speed, along with just about everyone else I know. Pastor and author John Mark Comer says that we’ve become accustomed (addicted, really) to fast and easy—but that the best stuff in life is often slow and difficult. The apostle Paul, in his celebrated and often-quoted Biblical passage about love, begins with “Love is patient…” James, the brother of Jesus, wrote that we should be “quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.”

It takes time to cultivate a way of being that is slower, more deliberate, thoughtful, and patient. The kind of character I’m hoping to develop doesn’t just happen automatically as the years go by. It’s a committed pursuit of living by the ideals we say are most important to us. And, I believe, it entails surrender, admitting to God that our efforts alone aren’t going to get us there.

When it comes to other people, there’s not a lot I can truly be certain of. Maybe the woman at the ATM could have used a hand with whatever she was looking for in the trunk. Maybe the folks cutting into traffic were late for something they were desperate to be on time for. Maybe I need to be more open to what’s going on in the lives of those whose lives intersect with mine, even when it’s unlikely I’ll ever see them again.

Part of the solution seems so simple, as many of the best answers often do. Both the commute on that Tuesday and the wait at the ATM would have felt a lot different if I could get better at easing off life’s gas pedal. An old Finnish proverb I stumbled across recently says, “God did not invent hurry.”  

I think the Finns are on to something.



Friday, November 19, 2021

A Strange Family History

She was only seven years old when it happened. It was in the summer, a dreadfully hot day. The breakfast dishes had been cleared off the table and piled high in the sink, flies buzzing around the table as her mother wiped it clean with a dishcloth. Edna Taylor was a large woman with an unruly head of hair which defied all attempts to keep it out of her face. Long strands fell this way and that as she cupped all the crumbs into her hand at the end of the table after a final swoop. Her seven year old daughter looked up at her from the door to the back porch, sensing that something wasn’t right. Edna looked worried and weak. 

“Lizzy, go on outside and play. Your mother needs some time alone. Run along!” Elizabeth heard the tone of her mother’s voice and understood it to be an order, not a suggestion. She bounded down the back steps and ran around to the front of the house where it was cooler. She looked down the field that sloped away from the great, white salt box house that went by the name of Blue Hill. The field of brown straw, scorched by the relentless summer sun, stretched all the way to the river. Elizabeth sat herself down on a stump of a tree that had been cut down earlier in the year after it had been struck by lightening. Edna had thought it a bad omen, a sign that her sick boy wasn’t long for this world. But that was months ago, and lately Chesty had seemed to be getting better. Elizabeth sat and watched the water drifting by slowly in the distance. She heard the whistle first then saw the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad train coming up from Gladstone on the other side of the river. She could smell the smoke from the engine some days, but today the wind, what little there was, was headed in the wrong direction. Still, she watched the train until it disappeared, worrying about her mother and her sick brother. 

It was just the three of them this morning. All the men were working and wouldn’t be back until lunch when the kitchen would come alive with noise and fuss as her father, three brothers and older sister came back to the house to eat. It always irked Elizabeth that her father wouldn’t allow her to go with them. “You’ve gotta stay with Momma, Lizzy. What’s gonna happen if she needs help with Chesty,” he would explain. 

Chesterton Taylor had been born in 1925 and had surprised the doctors by surviving his first year, then surprised them every year since. He had been born with what they called a weak heart and wasn’t given much of a chance. The fact that he was now twelve years old had been a testament to either God’s grace or an extra helping of the famous Taylor stubbornness gene. It hadn’t been much of a life though, he having spent much of it bedridden and weak as water. Elizabeth loved him, felt sorry for him, and on some level envied him their mother’s attention, But even a seven year old knew not to admit to such a thing. 

Suddenly Elizabeth thought she heard crying. Had the sound of the train drowned it out? How long had she been crying? Where was she? She ran around the house and saw her sitting on the steps holding her head in her hands, sobbing, great anguished cries of despair and heartache. Elizabeth ran up and wrapped her tiny arms around her inconsolable mother. “What’s the matter, Momma? Is it Chesty?”

Edna buried her face in her apron, wiped away the tears then lifted Elizabeth into her lap. “Chesty passed away, Lizzy. His time for suffering is finally over, he’s gone home.”

“But, this is his home,” Elizabeth cried.

“No Lizzy. This is just our earthly home.”

Thus went the strangest conversation of young Elizabeth’s short life for fifteen minutes or so as she rocked back and forth in her mother’s strong arms, not understanding but taking comfort in her odd words. Then they both saw him.

Blue Hill was a house that rested at the end of a two mile one-lane dirt road that slithered down the middle of the 700 acre farm like a serpent. To the north lay cow pastures, a couple of barns and on the highest point, the family cemetery. To the south, fields of corn and soybeans and more barns. From the back steps of the house you could see a car approaching from half a mile away, a tail of dust billowing behind it with the soft rumble of a distant engine. Neither of them saw or heard him approach. They just looked up and there he was, the morning sun shining off his white three-piece suit. He wore a white boater hat and his brown wingtip shoes looked like they had just been buffed clean. Not a trace of dust. Sitting at his feet was a Jack Russell terrier, his pink tongue bouncing up and down. Neither Elizabeth nor her mother felt any fear at the strange sight of a man in a clean suit who seemed to have arrived out of nowhere. When they looked up at him he tipped his hat and smiled down at them. 

“Good morning, Mrs. Taylor. I can see you’ve been crying. What’s troubling you?”

Elizabeth had never seen a kinder smile or heard a more soothing voice. She felt warm inside as he spoke. She heard her mother’s anguished answer, “It’s my boy. He’s dead.”

The dog walked forward, jumped up in her lap, curled around and laid down. The man took off his hat as if to acknowledge their loss then said, “I know, Mrs. Taylor. I’m so sorry. It’s a terrible thing to lose a child, especially one who has been sick for so long.” He then walked over and sat down beside her on the step, he on one side and Elizabeth on the other, both holding on to her. They rocked back and forth together while the dog slept peacefully in her mother’s lap.

Elizabeth couldn’t remember how long he was there. Time was a difficult concept for a seven year old. It felt like a long time but it might have only been a few minutes. Regardless, his presence had a calming effect on her mother. She had stopped sobbing, was no longer shaking with the force of her grief. The tears had dried up by the time he left. He had stood up slowly. The dog jumped down from her lap and joined him. His parting words were simple, “The men will be back soon.” Then the two of them walked back up the road. Elizabeth watched them get smaller and smaller, noticed the dust that their feet kicked up as they walked along, saw the sun shining off his boater hat. 

When her father, brothers and sister returned for lunch, they all began crying at the news. They gathered around Chesty’s bed and wept. Rosemary, Elizabeth’s only sister, was particularly distraught, draping herself over his dead body while she wailed. Her brothers mostly stood at a distance, arms crossed stiffly over their chests, eyes rimmed with tears. Her father held his filthy hat in both hands, lower lip trembling for a minute until he got a hold of himself. Then he said, “Ok, that’s enough of that,” as he gathered everyone up, led them out of the bedroom and closed the door. Edna served lunch. Everyone ate slowly, in silence. Elizabeth had never seen her family do anything quietly. They were loud people, always hollering and screaming about one thing or another, not with anger or malice, they were just loud. They spoke to each other loudly, worked loudly, even ate loudly. The clatter and tumult were an incessant part of Elizabeth’s life. Now, the seven of them sat around the long oak kitchen table so quietly you could hear the stirring of fly’s wings.

“Did ya’ll see the man wearing the white suit?” Edna asked, breaking the silence. They all exchanged glances. Her father answered, “What man?”

“You must have passed him on the road,” she insisted. “He just left us thirty minutes before ya’ll drove up. He had a little dog with him.”

“We didn’t see a man or a dog on the road. Who was he?”

Edna insisted that they couldn’t possibly have missed a man with such a sharp suit and fine dog. She told them all about his visit and as she talked they all began exchanging worried glances. Finally, Edna dropped the subject and the silence returned. Later that night when she tucked Elizabeth in bed she whispered in her ear, “Lizzy, that man was an angel sent from God to comfort us. Don’t you ever forget it, ya hear?”

And, she hadn’t. But oddly, had never bothered to share the story with her son until now, the night before he was to undergo open heart surgery to repair a faulty mitral valve. As she sat on the end of his bed regaling him with yet another creepy paranormal family secret, it occurred to Montgomery Duncan that his mother’s family history was chocked full of this sort of thing, Blue Hill being a house shot through with Gothic mystery. He made a mental note that if he survived his pending procedure, he would attempt to get to the bottom of it all. There were so many unanswered questions about the Taylors, so many odd tales. The least interesting part of this particular story was the fact that the beautiful woman sitting at the end of his bed telling it had been dead and in the ground for eleven months, having died in her sleep of heart failure herself, there being two things that prominently ran in the Taylor family, bad hearts and bedside visits from the dead. Montgomery chalked this one up to the delightful drug cocktail pulsing through his veins from the shiny IV bag beside his bed. But what to make of the half dozen other stories of premonitions, warnings and reassurance that had been provided from various dead Taylor Uncles, Aunts and Cousins through the years?

“What are you saying Ma, are you an angel sent to comfort me?”

“No. I’m just your mother.”

And with that, she was gone. Montgomery drifted off to sleep thinking about his grandmother, her dirty apron, the black wood stove in the dark kitchen, that heavy picnic style table that ran the length of the room. He pictured her turning from her cooking to see him standing at the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t sleep well in the huge red bedroom upstairs, always woke up before dawn and always found her busy in the kitchen.

“Come over here, child,” she would smile. “Give your Nanny a hug.”

She would envelope him in her apron and it always smelled like sausage. She would tussle his hair then sit him down at the table and give him a hot biscuit. 

“How come you always wake up so early?”

Montgomery never told her the truth. He never told her that Blue Hill scared the hell out of him at night. The big room upstairs was painted blood red and the only light was a single clear light bulb which hung from a long chord from the middle of the ceiling. For reasons that he didn’t understand the light always swayed a little from side to side sending shadows slithering across the walls. For a five year old boy this was the stuff from which nightmares were made. But all it took to break the spell was a visit to Nanny’s kitchen and the rising sun peaking through the screen door. For Montgomery, Blue Hill was part paradise and part haunted house. The haunting always happened at night making the arrival of the morning sun feel like paradise.


A nurse with kind eyes wearing a mask asked him to count backwards from ten. He felt a soft tingle in his arm, then a blast of cold air, then nothing. When next he opened his eyes he was hovering above the bobbing head of his surgeon looking down at the bright red blood surrounded by sky blue napkins in the middle of the table. He heard the buzz and gurgle of the ventilator and picked up parts of a conversation between the nurses about the results of a football game. Then over in a corner behind a tray of instruments he saw his mother staring intently at her son’s open chest. She was swaying from side to side with one arm raised towards heaven. This had always been how it was with Elizabeth Taylor Duncan, always turning up at the oddest times in the oddest places, always knowing something she had no way of knowing, understanding things she couldn’t possibly understand. Montgomery knew at that moment that he would survive the operation going on below. He would make a full and complete recovery. There suddenly wasn’t a doubt in his mind.




 Montgomery Duncan’s mother had died in her sleep. Slipped away without saying goodbye, unexpected and devastatingly final. Like any mother and son worthy of the names, much was left unsaid and unfinished. Their relationship had been strong and stable but their last conversation had been an argument. But he had no time to mourn properly because his father and the love of his mother’s life was now 87 and without her for the first time in 65 years. Edward Eugene Duncan had left Gladstone in 1943 on a Chesapeake and Ohio troop-train headed for San Francisco and then the South Pacific to fight the Japanese. His train chugged slowly past Blue Hill where a 13 year old Elizabeth Taylor sat on the steps and watched the billows of smoke rising from the engine disappearing into the morning mist, thinking about who might be on the train. She had a dream which had convinced her that she was going to meet and marry a man who rode past Blue Hill on that train one day. Three years later on the first day of her senior year in high school she discovered that a tall black haired older boy, back from the war, had been assigned the locker next to hers. They were both almost instantly smitten. Their decision to get married was a wildly unpopular one with practically everyone in the Taylor household. Edward was the son of share croppers and unworthy of a young girl from a family that possessed 700 acres of land. Despite their disapproval, Elizabeth and Edward were married at the Courthouse with only Elizabeth’s sister Rosemary representing the bride’s family. 

All of the Taylor family misgivings about Edward had eventually been forgotten when the couple started having children. By the time Montgomery had arrived, the fourth and last of the brood, all had been forgiven. The truth was that it was difficult to find fault with Edward. He was a pleasant man, strong and dependable, not afraid of hard work and a whiz with a rifle. He made Elizabeth happy. None of them could deny that. Eventually, Lizzy’s happiness and Edward’s quick smile won the day.

But when she passed away without warning, Montgomery simply couldn’t imagine how his father was going to manage without her. In sixty plus years of marriage they had spent not one single night apart. He would be lost without her, totally useless around the house, and impossibly lonely. As he had expected, things didn’t go well. His health rapidly declined and almost two years later to the day, Edward and Elizabeth were reunited in heaven. At least that’s what they both believed. Firmly and unequivocally. Montgomery’s parents were dead serious about their Christian faith, its teachings informing all aspects of their lives, guiding their decisions, commanding them to be better people, more loving and kind, more forgiving and generous than others thought they should be. “Lizzy,” friends would say, “You don’t have enough money to be giving it away to every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes along. Be reasonable!!” Her answer had always been some version of, “Well, maybe Tom, Dick and Harry need it more than I do!”

Eighteen months after her death, Montgomery brought his father some doughnuts one morning for breakfast, hoping the sight of sweets would brighten his day. He found him reading the paper in his recliner, his face sagging under the weight of loss and loneliness. He managed a smile when he saw his son walk in but it was a weak effort, not the over the top exaggerated one he usually managed to conjure up when one of his children came for a visit.

“How you feeling this morning, Pop?”

“Fit as a fiddle,” he replied, his stock answer. Everyday of his life he had been fit as a fiddle to anyone who bothered to ask.

But something was wrong. Montgomery had learned to read his father’s moods, could see through his superficial declarations that everything was wonderful. Edward Duncan lived in mortal fear of becoming a burden to his children, hated the thought that they might be worried about him. So, he declared himself fit as a fiddle and hoped for no follow up questions. But this morning after a couple doughnuts Montgomery persisted.

“Pop, you don’t look like your self today. You have a rough night?”

He folded up his paper and placed it on the table beside his chair, laid his head back and closed his eyes. “I don’t sleep well some nights.”

Montgomery knew enough to not interrupt his father on the rare occasions when he offered up any information about his condition, no matter how vague. He listened quietly, hoping for something more specific. 

“Most nights I fall right asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. But then I wake up a few hours later and can’t get back to sleep.”

Montgomery noticed for the first time that his father’s eyes were red and puffier than usual. Had he been crying?

“That what happened last night?” Montgomery, leading the witness.

Edward folded his hands together in his lap and kept his eyes shut, preferring not to look at his son as he talked. “But, last night was different...”

Montgomery had always had a hard time figuring out his father. He was a man of great contradictions. He was powerfully built but as gentle as a lamb. He could be frequently eloquent but opted for silence, preferring to listen to others talk. He loved hard physical labor and had the powerful, gnarled, vice grip hands to prove it, but was as well read as any man he had ever known. Suddenly he was in the mood to talk.

“You know how your mother was. Remember how she seemed to know about things before they happened, that confounding clairvoyance of hers?”

Montgomery smiled and nodded.

“I’m not sure I ever told you kids about the time...this was before you and Diane were born. Allen and Gail were little, not more than five or six. We lived over on the south side and we would travel a lot back and forth between there and Blue Hill. We must have made the trip at least a hundred times. Well, one Saturday morning we were headed up the country about twenty minutes outside of Midlothian when all of a sudden your mother said, ‘Edward! Edward! Stop the car, pull over!!’ Well, it scared me half to death. I thought maybe she was sick and needed to throw up or something. But no, she was pointing at this house up on a hill. There was a long driveway lined with magnolia trees and a nice brick two story house with a big fancy set of steps out front. ‘That house!! I’ve been in that house.’ Well, I started laughing out loud, ‘Lizzy,’ I said, ‘We have driven past this house a hundred times in the past three years. Unless you drove out here without me or visited it when you were a child, I can assure you that you have never been in that house. You know how I know that? First of all, before you married me you had never left Buckingham County, and second of all, you don’t drive!’ But she was insistent. ‘Edward, I had a dream last night that I was in that house. I can see it as plain as day. There’s a beautiful porcelain pitcher sitting on a half circle table underneath a gorgeous gold-framed mirror right when you come in the front door on the right. Then a huge library to the left with a fireplace and leather books all the way to the ceiling all around. Oh, and a piano in the corner.’ She went on and on describing the inside of the house. Finally I said, ‘Well, fine. But why did you want to pull off the highway?’ I knew I was in trouble when she answered, ‘because I need to see for myself. I am going to go up there and ask them if I can look at their house!’ You know your mother, there wasn’t a one in a million chance that I was going to talk her out of such a foolish idea, so the next thing I know, there we are standing on this stranger’s front porch ringing the doorbell. Luckily the woman who answered the door couldn’t have been nicer and invited us in straight away. Within five minutes, the two of them were as thick as thieves! Then I noticed the library and the leather books and the piano. I turned and saw the pitcher and the mirror. Son, it was exactly as your mother had described it! It was the strangest thing I had ever seen.”

As fascinating as his story was, Montgomery had a feeling that there was something else going on with his father, something that he was working up his nerve to share. Then he noticed the tears in his eyes.

“Mother was like that, of course. She had that strange relationship with the world around her. She saw things that nobody else saw, heard things, felt things that nobody else did.”

Montgomery nodded his head in agreement. None of this was a revelation. Everyone in the family knew that Elizabeth was...different. They had all preferred to describe it as her being, sensitive to the spiritual world, carefully avoiding any suggestion that this was anything other than a finely tuned and thoroughly Christian sensitivity. His father continued...

“Well, last night when I woke up, your mother was standing at the foot of my bed over by the window. At first she was staring out the window, but then she turned and smiled at me. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just laid there and smiled back. She didn’t say anything either.  She just glanced out the window then back at me. She was wearing a white nightgown and she looked just like she looked when we were first married...”

At this point, he couldn’t continue. Emotion overcame him and he cried openly, something that his son had never before seen. He got up and rushed to his side. “Oh Pop, why are you crying? It sounds like it was beautiful.”

“I’m crying because I miss her!” Edward seemed frustrated that his son would ask such a ridiculous question. Didn’t anyone understand the depths of his grief, the pain of his loneliness? “But I’m also crying because I don’t think it’s right, Montgomery. I’m a Christian man. I’m not supposed to believe in ghosts.”

Montgomery didn’t understand enough of the theological basis for such a statement and didn’t care to, and resisted the urge to say something snarky like, “What about the Holy Ghost?” Instead, in one of his finer moments as a son, managed to say, “Pop. Tell me something. When you saw Mom smiling at you from the window, how did it make you feel? Were you frightened? Afraid?”

“No. I was never once afraid. I felt warm all over. I was so happy to see her face again. She was so beautiful...”

“Well, how can that be a bad thing? How can that be from the devil? Seems to me that if you took comfort from her presence, maybe she was sent by God. Instead of thinking of her as a ghost, maybe you should think of her as an angel.”

It had been a invaluable gift that the son had given the father...permission to believe in the goodness of God, permission to believe that he hadn’t suddenly become a heretic, and permission to take comfort where he found it.

As Montgomery was driving home it occurred to him that when his mother had visited him bedside the night before his surgery, she had been wearing a white nightgown, and he hadn’t even recognized her at first, her hair had been so black and her face so alive with the light of youth.





Edna Taylor tossed and turned on the night of June 5th, 1944. It had been a rough Monday. Her knees were aching from being on her feet all day. Her back throbbed from a muscle she had pulled trying to lift a sack of flour from the truck that morning. But there was something else contributing to her insomnia. Her oldest boys were in the Army and rumors had been flying all around Buckingham County that something was up. Something over there. In all the time they had been gone she had received precious little communication, her boys not being big letter writers. What letters she did get were all weeks after the fact. They had survived North Africa. They had made it through Sicily. Still, she worried all day every day that she would get a visit from the man in the black car, the angel of death from the Defense Department. Every time she would see dust rising on the road in the distance her heart would skip a beat. Her husband would tell her, “Johnnie and Billy can take care of themselves. Rest easy, Edna.” But, at night after he had fallen asleep she was left in the bleak darkness of Blue Hill to battle her doubts and fears alone.

She wrapped her gown tightly around her shoulders and walked downstairs to the kitchen. Even though it was summertime it was still cool in the house late at night. She lifted a biscuit from under the checkered cloth of the bread basket, spread some jam on it and ate while she stared off into the distance. She thought about how painful it had been to lose Chesty. She tried to imagine if she had it in her to survive losing another. The tears overcame her quickly. She threw the biscuit to the side and buried her head in her hands, weeping like only a grieving mother can.

She felt a warm hand on her shoulder. She immediately regretted her outburst. Her husband needed his sleep more than anyone and all of her blubbering had woken him up. But when she looked up she felt a rush of cool air. Her heart raced. She could feel the hairs on her neck standing up as she looked into the face of her oldest, Johnnie. 

He smiled down at her, his wire rimmed glasses shimmering in the lantern light. He was in his dress uniform, medals on his left breast pocket, boots sharply polished and gleaming. He spoke, “Hello, Momma. It’s me, Johnnie. I don’t have much time but I wanted to let you know that me and Billy are going to be fine. We don’t want you worrying yourself to death, you hear? We love you and we promise we will be back before you know it.”

And just like that he vanished and she was alone in the kitchen, her heart pounding but now filled with joy. When weeks later word came that both of them had been on the beaches at Normandy, Edna Taylor, like Mary the Mother of Jesus 2000 years before, pondered these things in her heart. It would be years before she told the story.

By the time the story got told to Montgomery, his mother had been a bit foggy with the details. Did he appear in the kitchen or at her bedside? Was he wearing his dress uniform or his bloodied and stained combat clothes? But in every iteration he had heard, the consistent facts were that on the night before the D-Day assault in France, her tank-driving, war hero son had made a visit to Blue Hill to reassure his mother that he was going to make it.

But as Montgomery wrote the story down it occurred to him that the Taylor family lore wasn’t just stories of comforting visitations. Like all family histories, it’s a mixture of comedy and tragedy, ghosts from the past who bring both life and death. Just four years after D-Day came such a story.

Uriah Madison Taylor was the one and only lawyer in a family of farmers and builders. He had attended the University of Virginia and gotten a law degree while his brothers and sisters stayed put at Blue Hill. He was a giant of a man, physically imposing yet gregarious. He practiced law at his office in Charlottesville during the week then came home to his farm adjacent to Blue Hill which he ran along with his sister. Elizabeth remembered how her Uncle would always bring her gifts from Charlottesville, which to her might has well have been from the ancient marketplace in Algiers. Uncle Uriah was the Taylor family exotic, the farm boy who made good in the big city.

Uncle Uriah also had a soft spot for bad men. His work put a lot of them in jail, but he believed in second chances and redemption. As a result he worked to establish a work release program for first offenders, a first for Charlottesville. From time to time his soft-hearted disposition led him to hire these work released men to work on his sister’s farm. He ignored the warnings of his legal colleagues, refusing to give in to their world weary conclusion that some human beings were beyond redemption and that his kindness and compassion was at best misplaced and at worst, dangerous.

One particularly cold December Friday evening when Uriah got back to the farm, his sister complained about one of his “convicts” being excessively lazy, repeatedly refusing to do what she asked him to do. Uriah called him into the main house to talk with him and hopefully appeal to the better angels of his character that Uriah insisted lived somewhere within every man. An argument ensued. The man stormed out of the house and headed back to the small barracks housing building that Uriah had built for the workers. Uriah, against his sister’s warnings, insisted in pursuing him. When he walked through the front door of the barracks the man shot him in the chest with a double barrel shotgun. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Uriah Taylor’s death caused a sensation throughout the polite society of Charlottesville. Montgomery’s father had attended the trial and told of the heightened emotional rhetoric and the fierce, unrepentant heart of the killer. Although Uriah’s belief in redemption had ultimately cost him his life, people who knew him believed that if he had it to do all over again...he would have. It was not the first tragic death to occur on the farm at Blue Hill, and it was not to be the last. But Uriah’s murder was to be a reminder to the Taylor family that the world could be an unforgiving place.










Montgomery took a break from his writing, poured a cup of coffee and picked up the gold framed portrait of his parents from the gallery of pictures stacked across the top of the spinet piano in his library. Elizabeth’s smile was gentle, understated, as if she knew not to get too complacent. Life had a way of ambushing happiness. Truth be told, life as she had experienced it, was a series of shocks, unforeseen body blows administered by either providence or fate, that were meant to be overcome by force of will and unquestioned faith in the sovereignty of God. There was no room for bitterness, no time for selfishness and no point in questioning one’s lot in life. You get what you get and you don’t pitch a fit, she would say. Montgomery placed the picture back on the piano, sat back down and begin to think about what was perhaps his mother’s most difficult body blow. 


He had been eight years old. He was alone with his mother in their tiny cramped apartment in New Orleans, the result of her husband’s midlife religious conversation. In five short years since he had seen the light, everything about their lives had changed. Edward Duncan, with a wife and four kids, had quit the best job he ever had, enrolled in college and taken the graveyard shift at a factory in town to pay the bills, all in obedience to what he claimed was the audible voice of God calling him into the ministry while driving to work on Jefferson Davis highway in his beat up Plymouth Fury III. New Orleans was home to the Seminary to which he was accepted as the oldest student of the class of 1968. Now, six Duncans were shoehorned into a two bedroom apartment in the hottest, most humid place in the world.

It was another June 5th, a momentous date in Taylor family history, this time in 1966 when a sharp knock on the door surprised Montgomery’s mother. She had been cutting up vegetables in the kitchen and dropped the knife on the tile floor at the sound of it. She quickly dried her hands on a towel and opened the door. A tall dark haired man in a stiff black suit and a Bible in his hands stood in the doorway. He looked to be sweating around the collar of his stiffly starched shirt. His eyes were thin and glassy, his extended hand ghastly white and shaking. The angel of death.

“Elizabeth Taylor?” He asked politely.

Montgomery had been on the floor in front of the grainy black and white television with aluminum foil wrapped around its rabbit ears, trying to watch The Lone Ranger, but the appearance of the stranger at the door had turned his head just in time to see his mother lift both hands to cover her mouth as she responded, “Oh Lord, it’s my mother, isn’t it?”

Twenty four hours later the Duncans were crammed into a 1962 Chevy Impala station wagon headed back to Blue Hill for Edna Taylor’s funeral. Montgomery had picked up tidbits of the details surrounding the tragedy but not enough to understand. But as the roar of the recapped tires against the interstate hummed him to sleep he wondered how it was that his mother knew who had died before the weary man in the black suit had even spoken.

On the morning of the 5th on Blue Hill, Edna was scurrying around trying to get everything together for her weekly trip into Buckingham Courthouse with her impatient, whirling dervish of a husband, Madison Taylor, older brother of Uriah and the clear alpha dog of his loud and boisterous clan. Montgomery’s grandfather had always been a source of fascination to him. His voice boomed out from his throat like the words had been shot out of a cannon which always startled him. He was perpetually in motion, a man of action who never slowed down for anything, even to eat. Montgomery remembered watching in awe as his larger than life grandfather devoured a bowl of cereal in what seemed to be a matter of seconds. The man was stone cold deaf and no doubt could hear very little of what his talkative grandson was saying while he followed him around as he did his morning chores in the barns at Blue Hill. This morning was unlike any other, Madison Taylor was in a hurry. He had loaded the metal jugs of milk in the back of the pick up truck and had been ready to leave fifteen minutes before Edna finally climbed into her seat. “You’ll be late for your own funeral,” he teased. “Maybe so,” she responded, “but I’ll be well dressed.”

The dirt road that split the property was notoriously hilly and narrow, its one lane barely wide enough for one car, let alone two. As it left the farm and got within a stone’s throw of the State road, there was a steep hill where if you made the trip in the morning you looked directly into the sun, temporarily blinding you until you reached the crest. At the top of the hill on this morning, Madison Taylor’s pickup truck was going fast, wheels spinning, trying to get a grip in the loose gravel. When he broke through the bright sunlight it was too late. He collided head on with a vehicle breaking through the sun at the same time sending Edna, in the days before seatbelts, headlong into the windshield. She died at the scene and for all practical purposes her death put an end to the idyllic life the Taylor family had built at Blue Hill. Within a couple years a grief stricken Madison Taylor had sold the house and land. He couldn’t bear being reminded of Edna at every turn in the great empty house. The loss of Blue Hill being the biggest ripple from Edna Taylor’s tragic and untimely death.

An eight year old’s memories are famously obscure and befuddled. Such was the case with Montgomery Duncan’s as he tried to piece together the details of the funeral. He remembered not being allowed to go inside the church. He was kept in a car in the parking lot with a group of other young cousins. It was 1966 and perhaps the thought was that young children might not be ready for an open casket. The one image that remained crystal clear was that of two strong uncles holding each arm of his oldest cousin, Richie who seemed beyond consolation as he staggered into the church. Richie was the oldest son of Edna’s first born war hero, Johnnie, the one who had appeared to her the night before D-Day twenty one years to the day of her death. As her first grandson, Richie had been particularly beloved. He had loved his grandmother back with equal devotion, so her loss had hit him especially hard. But the sight of him being helped into the church, so distraught and overwhelmed had brought tears to Montgomery’s eyes. It had been Richie who had been behind the wheel of the car that collided with Madison’s pick up truck. The trauma the accident would prove to be the most difficult chapter of the Taylor family’s history.

Richie went on to live an extraordinary life, overcoming the sort of tragedy that might have forever damaged a lesser man. Within three years he was earning combat medals in Vietnam as an Army Ranger. Upon returning to the States after the war, he married well, raised a family of beautiful children, and worked heroically in local law enforcement for years. For Montgomery, Richie Taylor would forever be a hero, a man who overcame the tragic fate that had visited him on a clear morning in the summer of 1966.






There were so many cousins. The Taylors were a sprawling clan, the family tree heavy with fruit. When Montgomery was a boy he was closest to Uncle Johnnie’s kids, particularly Anna, the youngest. They were about the same age and possessed the same propensity for mischief. As he sat at the desk in his library surrounded by his mother’s correspondence, he noticed a letter she had written to Anna in 1969 but never sent. It was so typical of Elizabeth Taylor to write such  letters. Whenever she had a thought she would write it down with the greatest of intentions of sharing, but somehow her busy life would conspire against follow through. This note was so kind and loving it brought a lump to his throat as he read. His mother was trying to encourage her niece who was worried sick about her brother Richie. Even though Anna was only ten, she watched Walter Cronkite on their grainy black and white RCA Victor every night like everyone else. She heard the dour old man give the day’s kill numbers from Vietnam and her young heart would break with worry. Anna, every night I lift Richie up in my prayers. Each night I beg the Lord for protection for your brother. And each night God answers my prayers.


Montgomery smiled. It was so like his mother, basking in her unique personal connection with the creator of the universe. Of all the millions of prayers raised each night by the dutiful and the desperate, Elizabeth Taylor’s prayers were heard and answered. It was an otherworldly relationship that defied not only logic but theological scrutiny. Nevertheless, she persisted with undimmed confidence.


As Montgomery sifted through the letters and random scraps of paper he found a faded photograph of Richie and Anna taken in 1968. There was Richie in his sharp Army Ranger uniform with it’s distinctive beret, his arm around his little sister’s shoulder. Probably a going away party from the looks of it. Anna had been crying.


He remembered a story at that moment that he hadn’t thought about in years. It had been told to him years ago by Patty, Anna’s older sister. For some unknown reason, Richie and Anna were having a sleepover in the horrid back room at Blue Hill, the sinister red sofa frowning at them through the darkness. Richie heard his grandmother’s shuffling footsteps coming from the kitchen down the dark hallway to their room. “Kids? Wake up now. Put on your shoes and follow me.”


Edna led them both to the kitchen then to the back door. “Somebody is in the pasture. See?”


Anna squinted through the window and saw a pair of lanterns swaying with the rhythm of people walking. They were half way down the hill from the cemetery on this cloudy, moonless night. 


“Who are they?” Anna asked


“I don’t know, child.” Edna answered. “But they’ve been walking back and forth out there for the last thirty minutes so they are probably lost. I want you kids to go out there and unlock the gate for them. Whoever they are, they’re going to catch their death out there.”


When Montgomery first heard the story he remembered thinking, as he did now, what an odd strategy. Two strangers trespassing on your property in the middle of the night and instead of carrying a shotgun, she sends her two defenseless grandchildren out to greet them armed only with a lantern and each other. But, such was the less jaded existence of farm life in 1960’s America.


Anna, terrified, stayed glued to her brother’s side as they walked down the back steps, through the yard and past the barn where their grandfather kept his Packard. By the time they reached the big swinging gate at the entrance to the pasture, they noticed that the lanterns had stopped swaying. Richie hollered out, “You guys lost? Nanny says you should come inside and warm up or you’re gonna catch your death!”


Anna never wavered on what happened next. Every time she told the story, she added details, changed others, but this was the one stalwart and reliable fact...the lanterns vanished.


Hogwash!” Montgomery had exclaimed the first time hearing the tail. “More like the men blew their lanterns out and ran away!”


Anna was adamant. “NO, Cousin. By this time our eyes had adjusted to the darkness. We both could see outlines of their bodies and their floppy hats. When those lanterns went out, their shadows left with them. Besides, if they had run away we would have heard those lanterns rattling. I’m telling you, the both of them vanished into thin air.”


Eventually Montgomery had stopped arguing the point, letting his cousin believe whatever she wanted to believe. Later, older and wiser Richie confirmed Anna’s version of the story, adding much needed gravitas to the tale. Many theories had sprung up over the years since seeking to guess the identity of the two lantern carriers. The most popular suggested that since Edna had seen them walking down from the graveyard, it was probably the ghost of Maggie Watson, the daughter of freed slaves who had worked at Blue Hill as a housekeeper for their Great Grandfather when he owned the place. Eventually Maggie and her husband had purchased a small plot of land just west of the graveyard and lived there until they both passed away. The small cabin they had built had been torn down years ago. It must have been the two of them searching for their old home, the only building either of them had ever owned.