A Box of Sermons

       There I was, sleeping in the back of my Dad's 1994 blue Jeep Grand Cherokee on the way to Pearl, Mississippi. I loved that car. Pearl is a town famous to locals as the home of the Mississippi Braves and the best Bass Pro Shop in the state. Besides its residents, no one has ever heard of it. Getting to my grandparents house was always easy, even for a nine year old kid. You take the Jackson loop to Highway 47, drive until you've crossed over seven small bridges over seven small creeks. After the seventh bridge, you have officially entered into Webb country.

The first house you'll pass is my great Uncle Frank's. He lives across the road from his daughter, Dad's cousin, Lily. Between the first set of houses and my grandparents' house at the end live countless relatives, none of whom I have never met. I think they are either my third cousins or my great aunts, or maybe both. Uncle Doug used to live up the hill passed them, but he moved out after he divorced and converted to Mormonism. He runs a family farm in Water Valley now. My sister and I used to wake up in my grandparent's house at the crack of dawn, run across the small field that separated their house from Uncle Doug's, and wake up Lorrin and Erin, our cousins. They had a homemade treehouse, a trampoline, a pellet gun that my mom never let me touch, a computer, Jumanji the board game, and an Emu Farm. Yes, Uncle Doug raised Emus. Well, aside from his job with Terminex. I will say, raising Emus has its benefits. You'll never run short of Emu Oil or Emu Bug Spray- both of which we all seem to take for granted.
When you get to my grandparents' house, you'll hardly notice the driveway. The asphalt has faded and the shrubs haven't been cut in years. Take a left at Uncle Robin's trailer and head toward the farm house. Five or six cats will greet you at the doorstep. Three or four dogs will follow.

        Thanksgiving, 2011. This past Thanksgiving we loaded up the family Subaru Outback and drove out to Pearl, down the Seven Bridges Road, and up my Grandmother's crumbling driveway. The cats and dogs greeted us as we unpacked and moved into the cluttered, old farmhouse for the weekend. Uncle Robin came over and my brother, my Dad, and I helped him sort through one of the three cluttered trailers behind the house. My Grandmother has lived over eighty years on this earth and, to my knowledge, never thrown away a single possession she has ever owned. My Dad blames it on her being raised during the Great Depression. Regardless, there is no excuse for stuffing a bag cat food that expired in 1992 into a old metal trailer behind your house. The four of us started sifting through broken chairs and tattered paperback books. Uncle Robin stumbled upon a dusty picture frame and we all stopped our rummaging. Finally we had found something interesting. He showed it to us and I couldn't believe it. It was a picture of the farm taken in 1963. The entire property has since succumbed to the overgrowth of weeds and trees. The three trailers that now sit behind the house were nowhere to be found, and in their place was a small, wooden outhouse.
My dad spotted it first. He walked outside to see if it was still there. About thirty yards behind those shit-filled trailers, in the woods next to a fallen oak and a thicket of thorns was a broken apart outhouse. We made our way through the brush and hanging tree limbs out to the wrecked, old outhouse that my Dad and his brothers had to make use of every summer they'd spend at the Webb family farm as boys. After what seemed like thirty minutes of pushing through branches, scraping our knees and arms on bushes of thorns, we made it out the the outhouse. The first thing Uncle Robin pulled out was a rusted spring cot frame.
        Perhaps Grandma Bonnie felt she would someday put good use to that cot, just as she had had the tattered books and broken lamps in the trailers. We continued to dig through the outhouse, which had, over the course of time, been filled with scrap lumber, broken pipes and hornets' nests. I began filing through the junk, tossing aside empty, cracked picture frames and wooden boxes filled with torn up paper. When we finally made it through the collected mess in that outhouse, my brother called us over to one box. Dad opened the box and pulled out one of hundreds of scraps of paper. The first line read, in an unmistakable type-writer font, "June 4, 1975- A Message on Love, I Corinthians 13." The two men, my father and my uncle, dropped the junk in their hands and stared at the box at my brother's feet.
        The box was filled with Grandpa Wilbur's old Sermons. Every single one of them. It took my father days to sort through them all. Grandpa's ministry had spanned decades. It had moved his family across the southeast. The only service I got to attend with him was his last, on that gloomy morning in a white church in late October. We carried the box back through the woods and into my Grandma's house. I immediately went for the one on top. I Corinthians 13. "If I have the gift of prophesy, and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, And if I have a faith that can move mountains, But have not love, I am nothing."
        Love is an heirloom. It is a family watch that continues to shift gears. It is a box of sermons, an old spring cot. It is a small Mississippi town and a dusty picture frame. It is a 1994 blue Jeep Grand Cherokee. And even though I haven't seen that car in over ten years; even though it is probably crushed to pieces or broken down or sitting in some old guys garage, I know it is out there. I'd like to see that Jeep again someday. Maybe I will.