My father passed away just after I turned nine years old. The following year my family moved from our hometown of Bison, South Dakota to the Black Hills. I didn’t return to Bison for 25 years until the summer of 2006, when my husband and I, along with my family, went back for a visit.
My husband isn’t from the Midwest. I had tried to describe to him the “nothingness” of the open prairie – how the expanse of land and sky humbles you, makes you feel small and insignificant, while giving you a glimpse of how big God must be. But I don’t think he fully comprehended this until he actually experienced it for himself. Miles and miles of just the road before you and a sea of grass. The towns are few and far between, and many so small, not even a gas station can be found.
We drove over a low hill and approached the grain elevators of my hometown. The sign announced the dwindling population, not even 400 lived there now.
Entering the town, it was barely recognizable. Once familiar buildings had been altered or painted different colors. We searched for our childhood home, only to find a vacant lot in its place.
So many memories of my parents are of how hard they worked to create a good home for myself and my brother. Now there was no form of housing left, many of the trees my parents planted were missing, and the gardens they tended were overgrown with weeds. Even the stone path and rock terrace walls my dad spent backbreaking hours to build were reduced to rubble. All that was left was a shed my dad built, now in sore neglect.
A man’s life.
After all his toil and labor, I thought to myself, was this all that remained on the face of the earth to show my father had passed through this world, that he had left a mark? A headstone with his name on it a few hours away and this shed in a vacant lot before me? How sad, how wrong. With disappointment I turned away.
But I was wrong.
My husband and I were on our flight home to Tennessee when I started flipping through a Sky Mall magazine. A framed poster caught my eye, and when I read the print it said, “A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove... but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child.”
With tears in my eyes, I realized I had just traveled hundreds of miles, searching for some tangible trace of my father’s legacy, when I have been walking around with it all along. My father left his mark on me. |
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