Tucked into the gentle rolling hills of western Kentucky rests a town called Dawson Springs, the nation’s poster child for Resilience. A devastating fire in 1902 burned the entire town. They rebuilt. Then just a few years ago calamity struck again, in back-to-back years, in the form of deadly tornadoes.

Dawson Springs lies where the Pennyroyal Plateau tilts westward toward the floodplain, a green-lidded pocket of western Kentucky that once smelled of sulfur water and new money. Long before twisters and fire rewrote the map, this bluff above the Tradewater River was called “Buskins Spring,” a place the Chickasaw hunted and early settlers stopped to let their oxen drink. The water bubbled up cold and mineral-rich, tasting like rusted pennies washed in egg. A doctor with more ambition than patients declared it medicinal, and by the 1890s the town had re-christened itself “Dawson Springs” and begun bottling that pungent elixir by the barrel.

Pullman cars packed with city folk steamed in from Louisville and St. Louis. Ladies in white parasols strolled shaded promenades, sipping “Black Draught” from glasses clinking with shaved ice. A grand wooden hotel—The New Century—rose four stories beside the springs, advertising electric lights and ballroom orchestras. On summer evenings, the ball field at Riverside Park filled with tobacco farmers and traveling baseball clubs; legends say Honus Wagner slapped triples there before the Pirates claimed him. Coal lay shallow under the ridges, and the mines kept payrolls fat, the taverns louder, the Saturday streets busy.

Then 1902 struck flint against tinder. One careless spark in a Main Street livery stable raced through the dry clapboard downtown, devouring stores, offices, and the front porch of prosperity in a single July afternoon. By nightfall only chimneys jabbed the sky. Yet even as embers cooled, the townspeople gathered on the charred boardwalk, a resolve as plain as the soot on their faces: We build again. They hauled brick in wagons, laid foundations deeper, and slapped pine to joist. Within two years the storefronts stood straighter than before, each cornice line a quiet boast that Dawson Springs might burn, but it would not bow.

The spa era dimmed with the Great War and better medicines. Tourists chased newer fads; coal seams thinned; the grand hotel sagged into vacancy and winter rot. The town settled into modest rhythms—church suppers, Friday football, whistle of Norfolk Southern freight—content to be ordinary again. But ordinary does not shelter a place from the long arm of calamity.

On the night of December 10, 2021, warm Gulf air collided with a cold trough fresh out of the Rockies. The sky turned bruise-purple. By the time that rotating monster crossed the Mississippi it had chewed a path two hundred miles long and a mile wide, erasing subdivisions. Sirens wailed; power died. Locals still describe the sound as a locomotive whose tracks ran through their living rooms.

At sunrise seventy-five percent of the town’s structures lay twisted or gone—sheet-metal ribbons in tree limbs, family photographs plastered against brewery walls ten counties east. Chainsaws sputtered to life while dust still hung in the air. Neighbors pulled neighbors from splinter heaps. A retired nurse set up a triage table on what remained of her front porch. The mayor—her own roof scattered like playing cards—climbed onto a crushed patrol car and promised through a bullhorn, “We are not leaving this place to die.”

Hammers began to outnumber sirens. By late summer of 2022 new roofs glinted like scales under July sun and two dozen families moved into freshly framed houses laid out by Mennonite carpenters who refused payment beyond a handshake. The Dollar General reopened beneath a banner that read simply Still Here. The town library—its books once soaked and swollen—hosted a children’s reading hour on folding chairs amid half-hung drywall. Progress limped, but it came.

Then came January 1, 2023. A lesser funnel, but crueler in timing, pirouetted down the same scarred corridor, kicking apart what calloused hands had barely set upright. Tarps flew, sheathing ripped, and half-raised studs toppled like matchsticks. One resident, broom in hand, stared at her ruined kitchen and muttered, “Start over—again.” The words tasted of dust and stubborn will.

History might call these storms flukes of meteorology; the people of Dawson Springs call them tests. And tests, they’ll tell you, are passed in fellowship. Tractor operators from counties away brought front-end loaders unasked. A café owner—the only eatery still under roof—served plate lunches to linemen until her pantry was bare, then reopened the next morning after a farmer delivered two hogs and a sack of onions. The postmaster sorted mail under a blue tarp because bills still gotta find folks.

Government aid trickled. At the nightly firepit gatherings neighbors compared rebuild tips, shared bourbon, swapped tornado gallows humor. 

Locals lean on old tales for courage. They recount the 1902 fire, the 1937 flood, even the influenza wave that filled the cemetery’s northern rise. Each calamity is evidence of a previous comeback, a rung on the ladder they now climb. 

Outsiders come to photograph the destruction, but many leave with a hammer in hand. A roofing crew from Vermont stayed a month; a church youth group from Georgia gutted five basements in four days. Gratitude lingers longer than debris. 

Resilience is measurable in mundane triumphs. The Little League board drew chalk lines on a make-shift diamond carved from a soybean field; when the first pitch sailed under April sun, parents cried harder than the players. The pharmacy reopened in a trailer. A Wednesday farmers market re-emerged with tomatoes grown in pots behind whatever temporary shelter their growers occupied. Each tomato sold tasted of reclamation.

Yet no one romanticizes the hardship. Trees stand leafless where bark was sand-blasted by sheet-metal shrapnel. Insurance arguments keep kitchen tables encumbered with files. PTSD rides the thunderheads of every spring storm. But the town’s unofficial motto—This is a special place—carries new heft because it rode through vortex and came out scuffed but legible.

Dawson Springs once thrived on mineral water and coal trains. Today it thrives on borrowed tools, stubborn laughter, and the mantra of nail guns. It studies blueprints not for mansions but for a main street that hopes someday to smell of fresh coffee instead of splintered pine. The mayor still keeps that bullhorn handy, though nowadays she wields it to announce community cookouts rather than curfews.

The porch-light glow fades; this is now a town that will not be measured by the storms that demolish it, but by the hands that rise after each one to rebuild.

Dawson Springs, Kentucky. Population tallied by census, spirit counted by storms endured. Easy to find on a map—harder to comprehend until you’ve felt the pulse that beats beneath the rubble and ryegrass. 

In Phillips County, Arkansas, the land lies low and wide, spread beneath a vault of southern sky that can humble the proudest heart. Cotton once puffed like clouds across these fields; now the stalks are fewer, the gins quieter, but the soil still remembers and the people still endure. Between levee and two‑lane, three small African Methodist Episcopal churches keep their doors cracked open to hope: Allen Temple, Carter Chapel, and Mount Gillian. All three look to one man when Sunday comes around and the world needs tending—Reverend Dale McDonald.

He calls them his ladies, these weather‑grayed sanctuaries of cinder block and creaking pew, "the closest I have to a wife," he says with a shy laugh, aware that the joke rests on a bedrock of truth. Reverend McDonald is forty‑something, broad‑shouldered, a bear of a man whose handshake can swallow yours whole, yet whose voice can soften to a hush when prayer turns private. Every other weekend he rises long before daylight, climbs behind the wheel in Pine Bluff, and heads east through the Delta fog—ninety lonely miles, each one a quiet promise that he will show up no matter who else does.

"I've been doing this since about 2018," he tells me, his words rolling slow and sure, Delta cadence tempered by gospel cadence. "I love to serve God's people. Nursing homes, home visits, funerals—whatever the need, I go."

Those miles wear on a man, but he carries them the way an old plow horse carries harness: familiar weight, accepted without complaint. The AME tradition asks that of its pastors. Unashamedly Christian, unapologetically Black, the denomination sprang from Richard Allen's quiet rebellion in 1787, when Black worshipers walked out of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia rather than bow to segregation. Two centuries later that same flint of defiance glints in McDonald’s eye when he speaks of his calling:

"The calling and anointing just stayed on me until I just couldn't shake it no more."

From Mischief to Ministry

Dale McDonald grew up one of six children in a house where money ran thin but love somehow stayed thick. "It was not easy," he remembers, "situations come up all the time—bills and things—but it was never a time where I never had nothing to eat." The kitchen might have been crowded, the bedrooms shared, yet there was always a plate on the table and—thanks to his grandmother—a place on the church pew come Sunday.

"Church was one thing I just could not miss," he says, a grin curling under his neatly clipped beard. "You were in the pew on Sunday—yes, I was. Grandma saw to that."

Still, holiness sat uneasy on a teenage rebel. He cut up in class, talked loud, chased girls, passed a joint around beneath the bleachers, popped the top on more beers than he can now count from the pulpit. He tried on the usual sins the way a young man tries on somebody else’s letter jacket—half for show, half to see if it might fit. All the while the faint tug of purpose worried at him like a splinter he could not dig free.

"I had a calling probably when I was about 12 years old," he confesses, palms open. "But I did not pursue the ministry until I was like 28."

Twenty‑eight found him out of excuses. The voice he’d kept at arm’s length pressed in until he marched to his pastor’s office and laid it bare. I think I’m called. The pastor only nodded, unsurprised: I knew it from the day I met you. Within months Dale McDonald was swapping back pew for pulpit, trading mischief for ministry, holding a Bible instead of a blunt.

Shepherding Three Flocks

His circuit is a triangle of backroads and fields. Allen Temple squats on the edge of West Helena, its white paint peeling beneath Delta sun. Carter Chapel stands farther out, tucked among soybean rows. Mount Gillian sits on a rise just tall enough to catch a breeze off the river. Some Sundays the choir is four voices strong; others it is Reverend McDonald alone, stomping time on old pine boards and singing “Amazing Grace” until the rafters vibrate.

Attendance dips; collections lighten. The denomination still expects apportionments, insurance, upkeep. "Meeting the demands of your supervisors… they still demand a lot," he admits. He stretches every dollar, fills communion cups with thrift‑store wine, patches the leaky roof himself when the Deacon Board can’t raise the funds.

Yet the work that drains him also fills him. He baptizes babies, buries elders, and stands in living rooms thick with grief, one large hand on a quivering shoulder. "I go when people die in their family, gotta comfort them, no matter where they're at." On first Sundays he breaks bread at Allen Temple; second Sundays find him at Carter Chapel; third Sundays at Mount Gillian. Fourth Sundays he rotates, making sure no flock feels slighted. Fifth Sundays—when the calendar grants one—he tries to rest, though rest often loses to hospital visits.

A Second Ministry in the Halls of School

Weekdays he serves another at‑risk congregation: teenagers one bad decision away from expulsion. At Pine Bluff’s alternative high school he is part counselor, part drill sergeant, part big brother.

"I show them love," he explains. "I don't treat them like failures. They just messed up a lot of times."

He pushes them toward the stage where diplomas wait like unclaimed blessings, teaches life skills, shares the rough edges of his own past so they know mistakes need not become destiny. "Reach one, teach one," he says. It is not a slogan; it is a daily grind.

Bearing Family and Flock

Outside the churches and classrooms, responsibilities keep stacking. His father is now an amputee; his mother’s health staggers; his ninety‑one‑year‑old grandmother still bosses everybody around. He laughs when he says it, but there’s tender fatigue in the laugh. He is son, grandson, pastor, teacher—each role hungry for time. Marriage remains a prayer on hold. "I'm waiting for my wife. God got her somewhere." Until she appears, the three congregations remain his covenant.

The Gift on a Tuesday Afternoon

We met because I was late. A four‑hour sprint in a forty‑year‑old van called Josie turned into five; by the time I rolled up to Allen Temple the Sunday service was over. Inside, only Reverend McDonald, three church mothers, and a tangle of children tidying crayons remained. I apologized for the intrusion, explained the Hope & Generosity Tour, and asked if anyone might sit for an interview. The mothers, without hesitation, pointed their wrinkled fingers at the pastor—He’s the one. Um‑hum, he’s the one.

Two evenings later we sat in the fellowship hall, fluorescent light buzzing, recorder between us. He told his story straight—no polish, no pity. When we finished, I reached under Josie’s driver seat and produced a thick rubber‑banded stack of twenty‑dollar bills—fifty of them, adding to an even thousand. I slid the bundle across the folding table. His eyes widened, then brimmed. He started to speak, stopped, bowed his head. Finally:

"All I can say is thank you, brother. This will help keep the lights on, help get my people what they need."

He did not count the bills. He only nodded, slipped the roll into his Bible, and closed the cover as though sealing a prayer.

The Weight and the Wonder

Ask him about regrets and he shrugs. "I give people my time, and that's all I can do." Ask about temptation and he answers with weary candor: "As a pastor, you can't say what you want. People are always waiting for you to mess up." Yet the same public gaze that hems him in also keeps him walking straight. He lives transparent because he must.

Late that night I sat in Josie outside Carter Chapel, moonlight pooling on the hood. I thought about a boy who tried to hide from God behind marijuana smoke and locker‑room jokes, and about the man who now spends his paychecks on gasoline and funeral lilies. Somewhere between those two, a calling outlasted rebellion. That is the stubborn math of grace.

Phillips County still knows scarcity—vacant storefronts, fields gone to Johnson grass—but three steeples pierce the Delta haze, and every other Sunday a van from Pine Bluff rattles down the levee road, headlights cutting dawn. Inside, Reverend Dale McDonald hums a hymn his grandmother taught him. The crop he tends is souls, the harvest unseen, but he keeps sowing because that is what farmers and pastors do.

"I'm just doing God's calling," he told me. And then, softer, almost to himself: "It ain't always easy, but it's always worth it."

The Delta agrees. It has never been easy here—but beneath the hardship the soil remains impossibly rich. Plant a seed, and sooner or later something green will push through. Rev. McDonald plants words, plants mercy, plants stubborn hope. On good Sundays the church mothers sway and clap, the children giggle in the back row, and the pastor’s booming amen fills the rafters. On harder Sundays he still climbs into the pulpit, voice hoarse, heart heavy, and preaches to eight souls like they are eight hundred.

Either way the seed goes in.

The Delta does not come at you with trumpets; it slides up beside you like the river fog at dawn, and before you know it, you are wet to the bone with its history. I crossed the state line that morning with Josie humming a soft baritone, oil pressure steady, and the dashboard fan trying its best against a sagging Arkansas autumn. Cotton fields flanked the two-lane, bleaching in the sun like pages torn from an old ledger—debits, credits, lives. Ahead lay West Helena, population eight thousand and change on paper, half that in streetlight conversations after dark.

A First Glimpse

The highway spilled me onto Plaza Ave., the commercial spine of a body grown thin. Storefronts stood with shoulders slumped, windows cataracted by dust, plywood, or memories. And yet—every third building burst with sudden color: a mural of Muddy Waters bending a note skyward, a barbershop trimmed in red‑white‑blue stripes, a Pentecostal church proclaiming JESUS SAVES in letters tall enough to stare down a freight train. I parked Josie beside a faded Rexall ghost sign and stepped out into air that smelled of river mud, diesel, and frying catfish—a recipe older than the levees.

A man in overalls pushed a broom across cracked sidewalk squares. He nodded, as folks do when space is big and time is slow.

“Morning, traveler. You lost, or just lookin’?”

“Lookin’,” I said, offering a smile and getting one in return, thin but genuine. He pointed his broom at the vacant buildings.

“Used to be you couldn’t find a parking place on Friday night. Jukes hoppin’, gin mills pouring, steamboats whistlin’. Then the gins shut down, and the city just… caught a flat.”

He swept another arc of dust, like erasing chalk lines from a blackboard, and ambled on.

Façades and Phantoms

Online brochures will sell you an antebellum dream—white columns, mint juleps, the blues leaking sweet and low from every café. Some of it is true if you squint at sunset. But West Helena’s real posture shows when the light is straight overhead: shotgun houses sagging on cinder blocks, kudzu strangling the remains of a cotton warehouse, children playing three‑a‑side basketball on a rim with no net. Antebellum romance never mentions the eviction notices stapled to porch posts.

Still, façades matter. They offer rehearsal space for the soul. Each mural, each fresh coat of paint, is a bet laid down against despair, a statement that somebody here still believes tomorrow has weight.

Cotton Kingdoms and Empty Thrones

A century ago cotton reigned with a linty fist. Boll weevil, synthetic fiber, and global trade toppled that monarchy. What the pest didn’t eat, the markets suffocated.

Out by the levee I found rusted conveyors, their gears locked mid‑sentence, and cotton scales frozen at zero. The silence was so absolute I could hear the Mississippi breathing behind the dike, water impatient with its straightjacket of rip‑rap and politics.

Hunger, Holy Ground, and the Human Stubbornness

Hard times birthed hard statistics. Unemployment scratches twenty percent on bad months. Median income hovers south of the poverty line. Drug traffic runs the same streets once patrolled by brass bands. After dark some corners turn into confessionals where revolver muzzles do the absolving.

Yet on nearly every block a steeple pierces the Delta haze. Baptist, AME, COGIC, Missionary, Full Gospel—each sanctuary a lifeboat on a floodplain of want. On Wednesday night I slipped into New Zion Missionary Baptist. The choir, cobbled together from a few brave souls sang for a congregation of maybe twenty but the Alto's voice could have rattled Beale Street. The reverend preached from Ezekiel’s valley, bones rattling toward resurrection. When he shouted “Can these bones live?” nobody answered with words, but I saw nods, slow and sober, as though saying: they better.

After service, I joined a circle of ladies spooning red beans into Styrofoam bowls for whoever wandered in hungry. One elderly usher folded two twenties and slipped them into the love‑offering basket. “My tithe,” he whispered, eyes bright with quiet defiance. Poverty here is fact, but so is giving—often the same pocket, same hand, same moment.

I had stopped in West Helena in search of my next Hope & Generosity Tour profile subject. After we’d spent time together, he asked where I was off to next. I mentioned “nowhere and anywhere” and that I’d probably just hole up in a nearby WalMart parking lot for the night.

“Oh no, you don’t wanna do that,” he warned. “Look around, you in the heart of the Delta, my friend. This is a rough place… I’d get out of here if I was you.” I heeded his advice and pointed Josie toward a spot outside of town, down by the river.

Cash in Twenties

Here I met the next bearer of the Hope & Generosity gift—a local pastor whose story deserves its own chapter—but it was in West Helena that the bills passed from my hand to his: fifty crisp twenties bundled tight with a snap band. I felt the weight leave my pocket—a small bundle, yet heavy with intent. He blinked, speech darting between gratitude and disbelief, finally settling into a laugh that sounded like someone coming up for air.

Before leaving town I drove by Central High School. The buildings, unremarkable and utilitarian, were well cared for. I asked a boy named D’Andre what West Helena meant to him. He bounced a basketball once, thought hard, and said, “It’s home. Got to fix it.” Six words; an entire civic agenda.

Blues at Dusk

That evening I parked Josie atop the levee and watched the Mississippi slide by like a slow freight of silt and memory. A harmonica wailed somewhere distant, the notes bending into twilight. I thought of all the songs birthed in soil like this—of King Biscuit Time radio broadcasts, of Sonny Boy and Robert Lockwood Jr. The blues remains because the conditions remain: love and loss, sweat and river mud, a geometry of sorrow mapped to twelve bars.

Leaving, but Carrying

At dawn the river fog lifted, revealing barges pushing north against a mild current—steel leviathans stubbornly refusing to drift. I turned Josie’s key. Her engine sputtered, caught, then settled into that familiar beat. We rolled past clapboard houses painted in faded once‑bright colors, past a mural of Dr. King, past a yard where an old man watered tomatoes planted in tractor tires.

West Helena smoldered in the rearview, half‑ruin, half‑promise. I carried with me the smell of furnace slag and magnolia, the echo of that alto, the heft of absent cotton and present hope. The Delta is a teacher with rough hands; her lessons bruise, but they stick. She reminds a traveler that America’s heart isn’t polished marble—it’s soil, sometimes soaked, sometimes cracked, always waiting for a seed.

Some towns you pass through and forget by lunchtime. Others climb inside you, grit under the eyelid, impossible to ignore. West Helena did that. She is still there, humming beneath the levee, waiting for the next flood or the next revival—whichever comes first—and maybe, just maybe, for someone to believe that bones can live again.

Sky‑Road Soliloquy

Stay out on the road too long and a darkness begins to cling to the soul. It’s a murky twilight where shadows take on weight and hope a stranger. It was somewhere on the far side of the Arkansas line when that darkness slid across Josie’s windshield and settled beside me in the passenger seat. The horizon was a smudge of pewter, sky and earth welded together by November haze. The radio hissed with more static than song.

I had been on the road for hours, alone but not solitary, because loneliness is its own kind of company. Mile markers ticked by like reluctant confessions: Brenda should be here. The steering wheel vibrated with the noisey rattle of Josie’s sixty-seven horses, but the seat beside me stayed heartbreakingly empty, the indentation of her absence deeper than upholstery could show.

The Long Thin Thread

The road teaches lessons a man never asks for. It tells him what he loves by stripping him of it. It tells him who he is by leaving him to talk to himself when the sky goes purple and the only witness is a shape-shifting moon. Somewhere west of Siloam Springs the asphalt narrowed, shoulders fell away, and the world became a two‑lane thought-stretching exercise through pasture and pine. I eased back on the throttle, let the old van choose her own pace, and listened to the engine hum a low hymn of endurance.

Every couple dozen miles a town appeared—name on a green sign, maybe a grain elevator or a bait shop, then gone like a skipped heartbeat. I imagined Brenda walking those streets beside me, her laugh ricocheting off brick façades, her hand tipping invisible hats to the stray dogs that trot across every rural intersection. Without her the towns were cardboard cutouts: store fronts with no dialogue, parks with no children, sunsets with no audience.

I spoke to her aloud, nonsense sentences that fogged the windshield and vanished. You’d like this bend in the river. You’d scold me for drinking gas‑station coffee this weak. The cab absorbed my voice and gave nothing back, a confession booth without a priest.

Calling Home

Cell service was fickle out here; bars rose and fell like chestnuts in a carnival shell game. When a signal finally held, I pulled over beneath a cottonwood and dialed. Her voice answered—warm, clear, achingly close. We traded small facts first: weather, mileage, and yes, the dog never stops barking, what Josie had rattled on the highway. But the space between sentences filled with unspoken need. I could hear it in the hitch when she inhaled.

“I miss you,” she said, barely above a whisper.

“I miss me too,” I tried to joke, but the words clung to the roof of my mouth. What came out instead was a ragged exhale. “Soon. I’m turning the corner on the tour.”

Soon felt elastic—capable of stretching into weeks or more. She knew it; I knew it. Still, we pressed soon between us like a down-filled quilt, something warm to hold against the bruise of separation.

We said our goodnights. The call ended, and the cab emptied of everything but the scent of road dust and the metallic echo of her absence.

Sky, Unbroken

Night flattened the landscape, ironed out ridges and fences until only sky remained—an ocean of ink pricked by indifferent stars. I coasted onto the shoulder, killed the lights, and climbed to sit on Josie’s warm bumper. Above me the Milky Way spilled like a bucket of powdered sugar. I thought of Brenda beneath a different firmament—same stars, different longitude. I imagined a thread of light running from my chest to hers, taut as a violin string, humming with distance.

Out here silence is never absolute. Crickets sawed unseen fiddles; a coyote announced his hunger; Josie ticked as her engine cooled. These sounds folded into a lullaby older than any recorded song, and still I could not sleep. Loneliness is a restless bedfellow, forever rearranging the sheets.

I unrolled the bundle of twenty‑dollar bills—another thousand earmarked for tomorrow’s gift—and felt the weight of intention in my palm. Each crisp note carried a wish, a promise Brenda believed in as fiercely as I did. Keep going, the money said, find the next story, light another candle.

Dawn Reckoning

Just before sunrise a ribbon of fog crept off the pasture, slid across the blacktop, and licked at Josie’s tires. I fired the engine, headlights cutting ghostly tunnels through the white. As gears engaged, thoughts of Brenda rode shotgun: those gorgeous brown eyes, the stern way she folds laundry, the crooked grin she can’t suppress when puppies tumble over each other. I cataloged these details like a miser counting coins.

The sky blushed rose, then gold. With daylight came traffic—two pickups, a battered school bus, a funeral procession of migrating geese overhead. The world woke without ceremony, and I drove through it half‑ghost, half‑pilgrim, heading east, always east, the sun a burning breadcrumb leading home.

The Arithmetic of Distance

Loneliness isn’t static; it compounds. Ten miles without her equals an ache. A hundred becomes a low‑grade fever. By the thousandth mile it calcifies, an interior stone pressing against lung and heart. Yet the mathematics of return offer hope: each mile traveled now is one I won’t have to travel later. The distance shrinks, bead by bead, on an invisible abacus.

Somewhere in the Ozarks, on a ridge overlooking a patchwork of pastureland, I pulled over and scribbled Brenda a letter I’d never mail:

Dear Bren,

Today the sky was so wide it hurt. I wanted to stretch it like a quilt until it covered the miles between us. I bought peaches from a roadside stand—sweet enough to make a man believe in July, even in November—and wished you were there to taste the juice on my chin. The vendor’s dog followed me back to the van, tail helicoptering. He knew I was lonely. Dogs always know.

I’m carrying home stories like river stones in my pockets. Some are smooth already; others need tumbling. You’ll help me polish them, I hope, when the miles are memories.

Keep the porch light burning.

Always and forever,

Brock

I tucked the page into the glove box, beside spare fuses and the spare ignition switch.

Turning Toward Home

The road eventually arcs south then east, tracing rivers that refuse straight lines. Every curve feels like a conversation with Brenda—unfinished, to be resumed at the next bend. Towns blur: Mountain View, Batesville, Bald Knob. I stop only for fuel and to hand out hope wrapped in twenties, each gift a silent tribute to the woman who showed me how giving away pieces of yourself often leaves you more whole.

By dusk Josie and I pull up outside West Helena. I park near the river and sit on the front bumper. Across the water lies more highway, but also the promise of Brenda’s arms. The loneliness recedes a fraction, like a tide obeying distant moon‑logic.

I close my eyes and hear her laugh ride the evening breeze, as real as church bells. When I open them, the first star pricks the sky. I make a wish a grown man has no shame making: let the miles be merciful; let the road rise to meet me; let home be waiting, lights glowing, coffee hot, and Brenda’s hand finding mine before words are necessary.

The engine turns over. Headlights carve two bright rails toward the horizon. Somewhere up ahead a sign will announce the border of our state, and beyond that sign Brenda will be shaping a pillow, listening for Josie's distinctive engine rumble. I give Josie a little gas, and we chase the darkness eastward, carrying sky and thoughts and the unbreakable thread that leads me home.

I had been on the road since before dawn, rolling east on county blacktop that uncoiled through the hills like a length of knotted rope. Mile after mile, Josie’s two‑liter heart kept its brittle tempo—thrum‑thrum‑thrum—while my own thoughts wandered farther than the tires ever would. Out there a man has time to weigh himself against the horizon and come away small, a dust mote hitchhiking on the breath of America. When the green shield that read Siloam Springs—Next Right flashed by, I felt the sudden, inexplicable tug a traveler knows: slow down, turn in, see what waits.

Siloam Springs sits exactly where Arkansas ends and possibility begins, half river‐town, half college borough, with one foot planted in yesterday’s red clay and the other testing the quicksand of tomorrow. Fewer than two thousand souls in 1893; a handful more than seventeen thousand now. Numbers swell and contract like lungs, yet Main Street keeps its brick corset laced tight. I nosed Josie into the historic district just as morning slipped, unnoticed, into noon.

The town felt poised—like a stage set moments before the curtain lifts. Barricades angled across the cross‑streets; children scurried with fistfuls of miniature flags; an old collie, gray about the muzzle, tugged at its leash as if it too sensed the imminence of spectacle. I eased the van to the curb beside an apothecary storefront whose beveled glass still bore the gold‑leaf letters of yesteryear. Josie’s engine clicked down into silence. The parade, they said, would begin any minute.

I stepped out beneath a sky the color of boiled tin. November light, pale as skimmed milk, washed over brick façades and left the mortar lines glowing. The wind smelled of wood‑smoke and distant sycamore leaves moldering in the gullies east of town. Down the block a volunteer in an orange vest directed traffic with the serene authority that only belongs to small‑town officials and old barn cats. I asked him what was happening.

“Veterans Day, mister. We parade every year—rain, shine, or politics.” He grinned, tipped a sweat‑darkened ball cap, and waved the next pickup into a church lot.

I joined the line of townsfolk edging the curb. There was no crush, no elbowing for vantage, only an easy choreography—families with thermoses, elders bundled in surplus army coats, college kids from John Brown University clasping latte cups and curiosity. A grandmother unfolded a lawn chair with the reverence of pitching a tent on holy ground. Beside her a toddler tottered in circles, plastic Army helmet cocked over one ear. We waited, all of us, strangers knitted together by anticipation.

The parade announced itself first as a tremor in the pavement—bass drum reverberation riding up through the soles of my battered New Balance sneakers. Then came the color guard. Four firefighters in dress blues, buttons shining like coins at the bottom of a creek, advanced with the stars and stripes held high. Their polished shoes struck the bricks in perfect cadenced taps. No band yet, only boot heels and the whistle of wind sliding down W University St.

Behind them rumbled a flatbed draped in bunting, the edges fluttering like wounded swallows. Seated on hay bales were men whose posture betrayed both pride and pain: a Korean War radio operator with a scar notched across his cheek; two Vietnam combat engineers, shoulders squared despite the decades; a Gulf War nurse, her uniform jacket tailored neatly against new motherhood weight. They waved in that tentative, hesitant way veterans often do—as if still unsure they deserve the fuss. The crowd surged with applause, loud enough to drown the quiet things we never say.

Then the band turned the corner and poured itself into Main Street. Clarinet reeds squeaked, trombones lagged a half‑beat, but the drummer, a ruddy‑cheeked lad with freckles like gunpowder, kept the line marching true. They battered out “Anchors Aweigh” and the melody ricocheted between sandstone walls, rising into the overcast like a challenge to the sun itself.

Halfway through the procession a 1942 Willys Jeep chugged by, olive drab paint flaking at the fenders, windshield down, the driver in full WWII field garb despite the chill. Riding shotgun sat a woman of ninety‑one—hair pinned, lips crimson, eyes bright with mischief. A poster taped to the hood proclaimed Rosie the Riveter Rides Again. She flexed a bicep no bigger than a cornstalk, and the crowd roared its delight.

No float for a homecoming queen, none needed. The royalty this day wore campaign ribbons and orthopedic shoes.

I watched, notebook forgotten, as the parade wound toward the river bridge where it would disband. For twenty minutes the world shrank to the width of Main Street: one slender ribbon of bricks, border‑stitched by citizens who understood that gratitude grows best in the soil of remembrance.

When the last cadence faded, life resumed with small clatters. Barricades were dragged aside, shop doors propped open, and toddlers coaxed toward minivans. A kind of resonance lingered. The way a plucked guitar string hums long after the fingertip lifts. I stood a while in that after-music, letting it settle into the traveling spaces inside me.

Siloam Springs carries history the way old trees carry lightning scars. There are stories in every mortar gap: of Choctaw traders who once cooled their horses in Sager Creek, of prohibition agents smashing stills during the hard dry years, and of a flash flood in ’74 that crippled 40 businesses. The locals will tell you these tales if you show the courtesy of listening. On this afternoon, the bricks themselves seemed to speak—names chiseled into pavers by families who bought a square of sidewalk so their grandchildren would remember they too had walked here.

I wandered, sneakers scuffing fallen leaves, until the parade’s litter—candy wrappers, two crushed trumpet mutes, a stray flag ribbon—was all that remained. In the campus coffeehouse a trio of students argued Kierkegaard over cappuccino foam. Down at the barber shop three veterans compared medication dosages the way younger men compare horsepower. A train horn moaned from the western trestle, pulling a freight of grain and latched doors toward Tulsa.

Everywhere I turned, I felt the hinge where old meets new, solemn meets hopeful—the hinge every American town swings on if it is wise enough not to break.

At dusk I returned to Josie. Before climbing in, I reached behind the driver’s seat and withdrew a bundled stack of crisp twenties—held by a single red rubber band. Cash for the next stranger grace would reveal. I thumbed the edge, the bills whispering against one another like prairie grass. Somewhere ahead waited a pair of hands that needed this more than mine. The knowledge steadied me.

Engine lit, headlights carved twin tunnels through the settling fog, and we rolled away. In the mirror Siloam Springs dwindled to a glow, then to nothing at all, yet the echo of bugles and boot heels rode with me, soft as heartbeats beneath the van’s hum.

Miles later, beneath a sky now clear and brittle with stars, I caught myself smiling for no reason save this: that a small town had paused the machinery of its day so the living could honor the dead and the half-living could remember how to be whole. Some things, I decided, are worth more than distance, more than time, more even than a stack of twenties tucked behind a car seat.

And if roads are veins, carrying stories instead of blood, then let this be one of them: that on a gray November afternoon in Arkansas, the bricks of Main Street sang, and a traveler—dusty, road-weary, and not yet done—heard the song and believed again in the quiet, stubborn goodness of ordinary people.