Down Memory Lane

Terraville

This past Sunday, with my husband by my side, I mustered up my courage and we headed to the Terraville Reunion in Deadwood.  I had not seen the majority of these people since 1967 when we moved to Nevada Gulch just outside of Lead, SD.   Some of them had moved out of town before we did and then there were those who lived there before or after we did. It was not that I was afraid to meet these people; it was that sometimes I just don’t know what to talk about.

I found this reunion to be very exciting.  We all had one thing in common and that was Terraville.  One lady, who lived there before my family did, told me where she lived.  It took a minute for it to register and I said, “That is where I lived!” I am a little slow these days and I finally figured out that she lived there before we did, because I knew that no one lived there after we did.  We not only had the town and the house in common, we both remembered wonderful Christmases with the bay window.  (I came home and asked Chip if we could have a bay window!) We both had 4 siblings and remembered the yard and the outhouse.  Thankfully, we had indoor plumbing when we lived there. I asked her if she had left a poster behind called “Pharaoh’s Horses” and she did not remember it.  My brother and sister very carefully took the poster off the wall when Dad tore the house down.  I still have it!  Guess I will have to take it to the next reunion, which just may be where Terraville was located.

Special thanks go to Melody Shoop Helsing for preserving the history in photos and newspaper articles, and for the yearly planning of the reunion.

Someday there will be a reunion in Heaven. Thankfully, I don’t have to muster up courage to go there since I don’t know the day of my passing.  There will be a lot of people there that I haven’t met, but we will all have one thing in common and that is Jesus. I am sure that we will share our testimonies of how we came to know Christ as personal Savior and how He led us daily in our Christian lives.    We will have so much to talk about with all the saints of the past.

I am sure that many plans have been made for that special reunion in Heaven when “The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ will rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.  Wherefore comfort one another with these words. ( I Thessalonians 4:16-18) 

Tears

Tears seem to be something that we all dread.  I, for one, hate tears, but I have an overabundance of them.   Do we dread them because they are there due to pain or that they make us appear weak?  I believe that tears are an unspoken language that the whole world can understand.  We understand tears by the actions of the person before the tears begin.

When a person laughs so hard that they cry, we know that the person thought something was funny.  If a person hits his thumb with a hammer and cries, we know that it was a very painful hit.  If a person hears sad news and the tears flow down his face, we know that the person is sad.  If we attend a funeral and do not know what words to say, a hand clasp, a hug and tears tell the person that we grieve with him or her.

So for those of us, who seem to have an abundance of emotions shown by tears, please don’t dread them.  God made us that way and tears can say just the right “words” to the person who sees them and wants to understand them.