EPILOGUE

As I said at the beginning, I can see where almost all of it took place from where I’m sitting in my office overlooking Main Street. So much has changed and yet, with a little imagination, it’s not difficult to picture it as it was. Macalbee’s is now a local appliance center. The police station moved into a new building at the outskirts of town. Well, it’s twenty years old now. The original building just up the hill from here is gone. In its place is a parking lot for the hair salon next door.

The Crown Theater, which had flourished for so long, died in the ’70s when the new multiplex came in at the mall. It stood empty and dark for nearly two decades, but then a group of nostalgic citizens got together, raised some money, tore out the screen, and restored it to its original grandeur. Today it looks pretty much the way Adrienne Knoles must have seen it.

And the Mason Street Methodist Church? Still there. The congregation bought adjoining properties, tore down a few houses, and added a lot of Sunday school rooms and a fellowship hall, but all in all, it still looks the same as it did when the Franklins left the following year. They moved somewhere west; Illinois or Indiana, I think. I never really knew them but I did get to know Millie after she moved back to Mt. Jefferson. She taught high school here for years. She was my history teacher at MJHS. She was and still is a good friend to my parents, and, according to my dad and some old pictures I’ve seen, her mother, Dove, was every bit the beauty people said she was.

My great-grandpa Walter passed away quietly in his sleep—eleven years after that Christmas Eve—at the age of eighty-one. Turns out his illness was a virus just like they originally thought. For the undue agony he blamed the doctors, the doctors blamed the lab, and the lab blamed the technology. I didn’t care who was to blame, I was just glad we had him all those extra years. I count that as one of my many blessings and I think he did too. We spent many an after-school afternoon together just walking in the park, eating hamburgers and ice cream, and talking about anything and everything.

My great uncle Milton took an early retirement, and he and Aunt Colleen moved back to Richmond where he joined the family business. Office equipment I think. I never really knew them except for holiday get-togethers and a few family reunions.

Grandmother Doris and Pop Sterrett live in Florida and fish every morning and play bridge four times a week. She calls every Sunday night without fail and I have to tell her everything I had to eat for the past week, tell her what each of my kids did in school, and assure her that I’m still recycling. Pop seldom gets to talk but I know he cares.

Grandpa Buddy was offered the chief of police job, but turned it down and left the force. He took a less stressful job teaching a law enforcement class at a community college just down the road. And Grandma Amanda? Well, she held the family together. Some of the happiest moments in my life were spent in her kitchen and her backyard and simply in her presence. They, too, are gone and sorely missed. There’s a picture of the two of them just over there on the bookcase. They were a handsome couple.

Uncle Hoyt is a doctor and lives in Europe. I’m not real sure where, as his address seems to change nearly as often as his marital status. My kids get birthday cards from him stuffed with money every year but no one has seen him since he stopped in to show off a new bride nearly ten years ago.

And Mom and Dad. What can I say? They didn’t have it easy but they’re still in love, and you can’t get any better than that. Dad kept every promise he made at the precarious age of seventeen. He went to college, got his degree, and he and Mom raised three of us. We still get together on holidays and for family reunions. And though we enjoy Christmas mornings in our own homes, every Christmas Eve, we get together at Mom and Dad’s for an old fashioned bow-and-paper-strewn living room Christmas celebration with kids rolling on the floor and more food than ten families could eat. For some of us it’s a shorter night than it is for others. But no matter what time I finally get to bed, I can always be assured that sometime around 3 a.m., Dad will be sitting in the car in front of the house with two cups of coffee, waiting for me. To most people a middle-of-the-night Christmas Eve adventure might seem an imposition at best, or a fool’s errand at worst, but we wouldn’t miss it for all the roses in the world. Or even just for the eight long-stemmed ones that are always lying on the backseat of his car.

Four for Adrienne. And four for Walter.