The Lord's Houses (Part 2)
Where 2 and 3 are gathered, he is in the midst to bless, as says scripture. We needed a house and he provided an old manse in pieces.
I have never been inside that manse. I never even imagined what it looked like inside. But now it is going to be our next new house, kinda. I am 11.
One day, we walked behind our mother, in single file like ducklings, all five of us: 2 boys and 3 girls. I am the eldest.
We file past the tombs for the dead in the burial ground walking on the only road that ran through it to the Anglican church. My mother swings open the chain link-made gate, and we head into the manse yard. To my surprise, there before us was just the biggest heap of wood in a pile.
All rubble.
For as long as my mother and grandmother have been alive, that manse has stood there. It was built in the 1800s, when the enslaved Africans slaved on plantations there, and now, in 1973, it is gone—it is now going to be ours.
My mother picks up some pieces of wood, once part of a wall, that used to be in the manse and stacks them atop each other. She lifts each pile and settles it on each child’s head. We balance the wood and head to my grandmother’s house, some 15 minutes away on foot, down Brusche Dam, where we started living a few days before. We, the children, fetch piles with a few pieces of wood, but my mother fetches a lot.
We transport the wood on foot for most of the day.
We didn’t mind as we ran ahead of our mother to get the wood ourselves. We play games like tag on the way there. We are safe. (In those days, there were no motor cars on Brusche Dam Road to worry about). We are about to learn life lessons way advanced for our age. It’s not as if we asked for them. It’s just life and what we are given. And as young children under the age of 12, we bend with the roads of life not resisting because we are too innocent to know what tragedy really is.
Thanks for reading.