Streams of Mercy

I was back in the little mining camp where I lived my first ten years over Labor Day Week-end, to preach the Homecoming Service for the Mary Helen United Methodist Church. The church, the mine office and the ever-expanding mines are all that’s left of life there, once so rich and full.

“Coming home” brings a strange mix of feelings. There’s a sadness that what “used to be” is no longer, but there’s gratitude that it ever was there at all. There’s an emptiness at its loss, but a flooding with memories of all the love shared. There are thoughts of all that is gone, but precious memories that live on. That’s what “coming home” is all about.

Driving into Mary Helen this week-end, my heart sees rows of white wooden houses – First Lane, Second Lane, Third Lane and a few more, those houses filled with neighbors and friends. There are houses up “Macaroni Holler” and more up “Tipple Holler”, and the nicer “upper camp” houses across the tracks above the company store. I remember the “outhouses” – I was sure that one day I’d fall in and never be seen again!

My brother and I played every day with a family of seven children on the First Lane, and we felt like part of the family. When their Daddy would come home from the mines, we would all gather round and he would open his lunch pail and take out the raisin cake he had saved and cut it so each of us would get a bite! I enjoyed sliding down the hill on boxes broken down and dumped by the company store and reaching through a neighbor’s fence to help myself to their strawberries.

In my heart, I hear the sounds of children at play on the hillsides, in the streams, the tipple grinding away, trains coming and going and the work whistle blowing at the end of shifts in the mine. I can see my younger self skipping up the steps and around to the office where Mama and Daddy worked, to get some “scrip” to buy candy in the company store. I remember the day I learned our “Mary Helen money” didn’t work in the candy machine at the Margie Grande Theatre in Harlan- a nickel was a big loss in those days! I remember the elementary school up the hill behind the church and the little one room schoolhouse where my older brother was in First Grade. I remembered the “colored camp” down below the sawmill, and that I always wanted to play with the children who lived there. I remember having to go inside when the coal locomotive went by – the smoky cinder particles would land in my hair, and would have to be washed before Saturday night! I had to go in on nights the Union met, because “trouble” could come from those gatherings!

I remember walking the railroad tracks through the camp, sometime on the rails themselves like the bigger kids, but mostly just taking giant steps from cross-tie to cross-tie. I remember lots of penicillin and allergy shots. When the “live” polio vaccine came out, I was given my shot in front of all the children at school, because I wasn’t afraid of needles. When I was still doing well two weeks later, most of the children’s parents agreed to let them have the “live” vaccine! I remember how beautiful Mary Helen was in the fall, and how I felt the strength of the mountains around me, and a safety in their embrace.

While Thomas Wolfe says “you can’t go home again,” perhaps the deeper truth is that we never truly leave! I give thanks for this experience of “coming home,” and for those streams of mercy, never ceasing, carrying us through this life and into the life to come.

Elizabeth