Summer Sundays when the weather was not a grey sheet of rain or woolen with humidity were good for drives. The family was packed into the Plymouth with its proud fins and quietly we drove out of town on a nicely paved road. The paved road was soon abandoned, however, because paved roads were not what Sunday drives were about. They were about the small, gravel roads that crisscrossed the countryside in mile squares. These little roads led past fields of growing soy beans, and bright green, rustling corn and pastures where black cows ate and moved in slow motion through the afternoon. Dad drove at a slow, deliberate pace with his fingers interlocked and forearms draped over the top of the steering wheel. Behind us a tan rooster tail rose up for a while and then settled back on the weeds along the road. My Dad commented on the state of the crops. My Mother editorialized about the character of farm families based on how yards were tended, side ditches mowed, or the moral stain of hanging out washing on Sunday. Their conversations were intermittent, catalyzed by a name on a mailbox that triggered a history. Children, marriages, failures filled the car for a while and then silence returned.
Scattered about the countryside were small, old churches. They were mostly unused or, if they were, it was by a stubborn handful of souls who shared a preacher with another small congregation on alternate Sundays. Vacant or not each had alongside it a cemetery, and that is where the drive would halt. The parents would stretch themselves out of the car and then wander amongst the tired, tilting gravestones. From the names and their memories families, stories, relationships were resurrected. It seemed to engender a kind of reassurance in them that escaped the bored, antsy kids who dallied under the shade of an old oak or threw stones into the nearby creek. This wandering around the grey stones with their fading writing elicited an oral history that helped my parents make sense of their lives. Perhaps they were comforted by the idea that someone years in the future would stop by the Maxville cemetery where they would reside and point at their shared headstone and remember that he was kind and she was hard but fair, and, on that future Sunday, that recollection would help keep their place in the weave of the fabric.