Dispatch #34
Saturday, October 12
Princeton, Illinois

Dark clouds all day long, from Iowa to Illinois, from morning to the evening. Rain, too. A drizzling, chilly, droop-leafed day. And if the latitude makes this weather (my own home latitude) then following the rains the trees will suddenly be tight and naked.

First the color changes brighter and brighter, and then the rain cancels color altogether. How brief this autumnal gold.

Now at 6 pm the wind is rocking my camper.

In a week and a day we shall be home again.

I have never doubted the importance of this tour, not at the beginning, not at the hospital, not now. But I have grown sometimes sad with a rain-dreary homesickness. I miss Thanne.

This morning I called home and found that daughter Mary had come to visit with her two children. Noah talked with me, giggling the most happy giggle, because he had "attached" himself to his grandma by means of the cord a parent will use to keep a little kid in tow. He liked the nearness. He liked, I think, the visible, tactile evidence of relationship. And he had already planned to go exploring in the woods with his grandma and the school-basket in which he meant to keep treasures found outdoors.

That flush-faced giggle, that glad childhood cuts me two ways, for I am ever delighted to brush lives with that kid; with my grandchildren I am young again. But I am at the same time sorry to be sitting here in a camper--in the everlasting tedium of a persisting rain--far apart from that gladness. Ahhh.

This day concludes the seventh week of the OutSpoken Tour. Good weeks: we've met now nearly 4,500 people. The rally in Cedar Rapids drew something like 250 teenagers and a flow of adults that measured more than their kids. Not a space was left open in the entire church, nave nor balcony, folding chairs nor cry room. A remarkable people. Seven very good weeks.

Nor will I take less pleasure in the rallies still to come.

But a person may meet thousands of hearty folk and faithful, yet still miss his home, his wife, his routine, his grandchildren, yes, and the changing of the autumn trees in his own yard, throughout his own woods.

There is one majestic pine which stands on a higher ridge of ground between our fields and our woods. As the branches of the woods shake bare, that green pine grows more and more evident through shivering stands of hickory and oak and wild cherry. I call that tree The Signal Pine, since even from the back yard of our house it can also be seen, marking the land by its dark grace and its ascendant green glory.

I wish I could lay eyes on that particular tree right now.

I wish Thanne and I were eating our evening meal together, talking, talking, while the night grows dark.

And here's the irony: although I may reason this issue and say unto my soul, "Eight days! There are but eight days till we see one another again," it is instead the greater load of seven weeks which bears down upon my soul and makes re-union seem so far away and this night so lonely.

It is a good work we do these weeks, Susan and Brenda and Dixie and Linda and Gene and Myra and Tom and I. But the goodness of some work does not make it light work after all. Good work can be very hard work--and, yes: a person may most certainly grow weary in well-doing, the Apostle notwithstanding.

But this is Illinois, and the only state left for me after this one is Indiana, and my town (and my campus) of Valparaiso. And what shall I say to my students when I get there?

Oh, my dear ones, hello again.

And to my family there may need no word to express my feeling; there may be no such word at all.

Just this: Look at you! Ah, yes, and look at me. We are together, and that declares us home again.

Come, Thanne. Walk with me to the Signal Pine--where you went with our grandchildren while I was so long gone.

Come.

Walt