Clarksburg is the sort of speck that travelers miss while adjusting the radio dial. You glide along Missouri Route 87, thinking about the next gas fill-up or the distant gray of an afternoon rainline, and—blink—Clarksburg is already receding in the side-view mirror, a brief punctuation between soybean fields and the slow, green breathing of the Ozark edge.

But if you lift your foot from the accelerator—if you let curiosity do the steering and follow the low, unhurried cadence of a side street—you’ll find a village cinched tight to the prairie, small enough for gossip to cross town faster than the school bell, yet wide enough, somehow, to hold a century and change of stories. Two hundred and fifty people. More dogs than stop signs.

I rolled in on a windblown Tuesday that smelled of warming silage. Josie’s oil-stained clock said ten-fifteen; a digital time/temp LED in an ancient storefront blinked in agreement, as if to say, Yes, stranger, you’re exactly on time for nothing in particular.

The town sprang up around the turn of the century, named after
a merchant whose legacy has faded into the whispers of time.

A town the size of a memory

Clarksburg clings to the gentle swell of central Missouri the way a seed head clings to wool—light, unassuming, but not about to let go. Its main road, once a stagecoach trace, now carries grain trucks down to the river ports. Two rows of buildings face one another like weather-beaten boxers, still standing after twelve hard rounds with drought, depression, war, and Walmart.

The first façade is the post office, established 1897, still sorting mail behind glass-fronted pigeonholes the color of tea-stained bone. A blue drop box sits out front listing collection times nobody bothers to memorize; locals hand envelopes through the counter slot so they can ask the postmaster whether the doctor pulled through his gallbladder surgery or whether Carson’s heifer calved overnight. The news sinks in faster that way.

An unblinking gas pump from the Carter administration sits like an artifact behind a cracked window, $0.89 still frozen on its face. The pump belongs to a boarded-up service station whose owner died decades back; no one had the heart or the capital to fill the vacancy. The relic stands anyway, a museum to the age when roadmaps came with wiper-fluid fill-ups.

To the east sits the Tractor Supply Company, the only place for 25 miles where you can buy #2 diesel, a roll of barbed wire, a Baby Ruth, and ten minutes of advice about fescue fungus. 

Bereft of its own diners, locals head out Highway 50 for a 10-minute drive to the Flame Diner working a griddle scarred black by time and bacon. A dozen tables inside. A dry erase whiteboard advertises “Three-egg skillet, any style, $7.99,” though everyone just orders “The Regular”: eggs over, toast, hash browns so crisp you taste the iron skillet, coffee poured until you surrender. The Regular is not on the menu. You’re expected to know.

From the post office you can see nearly everything that matters: water tower painted farmhouse white, the single blinking street light, and the tin roof of Clarksburg Baptist church—part clapboard, two dozen pews, an organ that wheezes like an asthmatic angel. The pastor preaches Sundays, Wednesdays, and whenever else grief knocks on a door too loudly to ignore.

The land beyond the fences

Step past the last house on Sappington Road, and the town gives way to prairie so abruptly you half expect a No Trespassing sign from Mother Nature. The fields lie in autumn quilt patches—one square of rusted corn stubble, one of lime-foamed alfalfa, one of soy ready to bean-dust at the first hard frost.

Out here the silence is muscular. It’s broken only by the far rattle of a John Deere knocking gears or the whick of wind through hedgerows. The horizon stretches so far you can almost see the curvature of hope itself. People in big cities talk about open-concept living; Clarksburg invented the idea when no one was watching.

Lives stitched together

The Clarksburg Grade School is “temporarily closed.” 

The high schoolers take a bus eight miles west to Tipton; the ride is long enough for whispered crushes and algebra panic, and for the older boys to argue about which rodeo in summer pays bigger purse money. They plan to come back to the family acreage, build pole barns, raise children who will take this same ride. That cycle—older than the post office—spins with dependable gravity.

After school, baseball in spring and six-man football in fall unfold on a diamond cut from the outfield of time. When the Bulldogs score, the entire bleacher—forty people on a good night—rises in a roar bigger than the attendance should allow. Car horns join in. It feels like losing your hearing to happiness.

The small ceremonies

Saturday afternoons, if the weather permits, three retired men lean lawn chairs against the shuttered gas station. They wear seed-company ball caps, nurse Shasta colas, and hold court on topics ranging from soybean futures to whether the mayor should plant red instead of white geraniums in the planters. Passing pickups toot hello. 

Weddings happen in the church—pews draped with paper bells, punch served in Styrofoam cups, newlyweds ducking through a borrowed arch of softball bats or volunteer fire-hoses. Funerals happen in the same nave, hymnals still marked from the previous Sunday. The same piano plays How Great Thou Art for both ceremonies, because joy and sorrow drink from the same well.

On Memorial Day, flags sprout in the cemetery like a second crop. Children weave among stones reading names that match their classmates’, half recognizing the looping cursive of heritage. Older women in sun hats brush ants from flat markers, place marigolds, and murmur that the soil looks good for another year of rest.

The hum beneath the hush

Clarksburg may seem fossilized to the untrained glance, but life hums beneath the hush. Broadband wires—thin as fishing line—now snake under the gravel alleys, carrying Netflix to farmhouse living rooms where grandfathers once tuned only to Cardinals baseball through AM static. A solar panel gleams atop the co-op roof, feeding watts back to the grid. 

Yet none of these novelties disturbs the baseline rhythm: dawn chores, café gossip, school bell, hymn practice, dusk chores, and sleep. In Clarksburg, time moves not by digital minutes but by animal needs and soil commands. Cattle bawl when the water trough ices. Wheat heads bow when ready for the combine. The people bow, too—in prayer, in neighborly deference, in resignation to winter, in gratitude for spring.

Dusk settling like a blanket

Evening drapes Clarksburg gently, careful not to wrinkle the neat rows of porch lights. The sky displays its unabashed cloud porn, melting into lavender. You might hear a screen door squeak, the clink of ice in sweet tea, or a final lazy bark from a dog too tired to chase the night’s first rabbit.

Main Street asphalt holds the day’s warmth; you could, if you wanted, lie down and feel summer radiate into your bones. Above, the Milky Way appears—undimmed by neon, unchallenged by traffic glare—proof that light can live in small places unannounced.

Some nights, when the humidity is just right, laughter from a kitchen table carries all the way to the cemetery gate. It drifts between granite stones, a reminder to the resting that the town still works, still worries, still sings. Tomorrow will bring chores, bruised knuckles, gossip, school lessons, and another sunrise. That is plenty.

In praise of unremarkable places

If guidebooks list Clarksburg at all, they misfile it under “nothing to see here.” No museum, no Civil War skirmish, no world-record pecan log. Yet the place stands as a sermon to anyone willing to sit still: greatness does not always wear marble columns and admission fees. Sometimes it wears field dust, carries groceries to the widow on Hickory Street, changes a flat tire in January wind, and hums Amazing Grace under its breath.

Clarksburg will not ask you to stay; small towns learned long ago that wanderers must wander. But if you pause, even for the length of a cup of coffee, you will sense—just beneath the rural hush—an engine of belonging older than statehood. It thrums in the handshake that lasts a beat longer than courtesy, in the postmistress’s knowledge of every birthday, in the patch-on-patch quilt of mutual dependence.

Drive away, and you may forget the town’s name within an hour. But on some distant afternoon, the smell of fresh-turned loam or the creak of a screen door will stir a memory you can’t place, and your heart will tighten with a small, inexplicable homesickness. That’s Clarksburg—quiet as a gravestone, enduring as bedrock, content to dwell in the margins where the extraordinary germinates inside the ordinary.

And if you should ever pass that way again, the lilt of church hymns—old as the post office, loyal as the prairie wind—will greet you, neither early nor late, perfectly on time for nothing in particular and everything that matters.

Gloria Evans doesn’t stride into a room. She slides, as unobtrusive as dawn edging past night, making no more fuss than a robin settling on a fence post. Yet somehow—by some alchemy of presence and intention—every room she enters seems to brighten around the edges. It is not the flash of showmanship, but the slow bloom of a coal banked all night and coaxed back to flame: modest, deliberate, inevitable.

At eighty-two, Gloria measures barely five-foot-five in her orthopedic shoes, but the townsfolk of Marshall, Missouri, speak of her the way homesteaders once spoke of well water or prevailing winds—an elemental fact woven into daily survival. She has served as a Foster Grandparent for seventeen years, logging more volunteer hours than any other senior in Saline County. The program was a federal initiative born in the War on Poverty days that pairs senior citizens with children who need extra attention and care. The program provides a small stipend to low-income seniors who serve between fifteen and forty hours per week, though you'd never catch Grandma Gloria counting the hours or thinking about the money.

The children at Spainhower Primary call her Grandma as naturally as they call the teacher Mrs. or the history teacher Coach. So do the teachers, the janitors, and the post office clerk who sells Gloria Forever stamps in sheets of a hundred because “Grandma” still writes thank-you letters in curling script.

If you drive the square on a Saturday around noon, you might glimpse her through the plate-glass of a diner—silver bun tight, reading glasses perched, tiny bites of raisin-cream pie disappearing between notes scribbled in a spiral memo pad. She is likely listing vocabulary words for phonics lessons, or inventories of glue sticks, or birthdays of every child in Mrs. Oakley’s kindergarten class. She does not bother the waitress for refills; those working have long ago learned to top the mug before Gloria looks up. Small economies like that keep the machinery of Marshall turning.

1 Roots Reaching Back to Dust and Flood

Gloria was born in 1942, on a tenant farm ten miles southeast of town where the Lamine River loops like an old man’s knuckle. Her mother, sewed feed-sack dresses, sold baked pies at church socials, and managed to tuck away coins in a Mason jar for each child’s “going-on” fund—going on to college, or war, or marriage. From her mother, Gloria learned the geometry of generosity: pie divided by eight still nourishes; light divided by windows still shines.

She found the program after her husband passed 22 years ago, at a time when grief had left a hollow space in her days and nights. Widowhood can hollow a house with the efficiency of termites. For half a year Gloria drifted room to room, straightening curtains that refused to misalign, setting two plates at supper and removing one before the amen. Then came the morning she woke to the silence of her own heartbeat and decided loneliness was a choice she could no longer afford.

“I was just lonely and needed something to do,” she says, though there’s a softness in her voice that tells a different story—one of a woman searching not for activity, but for meaning, for a way to matter again in a world that had taken so much from her.

2 The Call That Wasn’t Quite a Calling

Gloria had heard of the Foster Grandparents program here and there around town, didn’t think much about it at first. The program “Wanted—Seniors 55+ to tutor and mentor children. Patience preferred.”  She took it as a nudge—nothing mystical, just the ordinary guidance of coincidence, which in small towns is often considered the Holy Spirit’s shorthand.

Orientation was held in the basement of the Martin Community Center. After ingesting all the rules and regulations of the program, Gloria chose Spainhower Primary: “I figured start with the little ones,” she tells me, “maybe it’ll give them a running start at life.” 

Seventeen years later Gloria has been through multiple principals, and seventeenth batches of wobbly five-year-olds. The school year now divides into two epochs: Before Grandma and After She Walks Through the Door. Children modulate voice levels at her raised eyebrow; pencils cease fidgeting at her gentle tap; broken hearts glue themselves back together under her humming of a tune so soft only hurt feelings can hear.

3 A Morning in Spainhower

I watch her move through the classroom one day late in October. A flood of fluorescent light glares overhead, but Grandma Gloria seems lit from a different source—somewhere between kerosene lamp and campfire. She squats in a too-tiny chair (never mind the arthritic knees) that brings her down the level of the children. Beside a young boy, whose tongue protrudes in concentration as he reverses his b and d again. Gloria guides his hand with the lightest fingertip touch until the stem faces right. “d for dinosaur,” she whispers, and his shoulders drop in relief. Twenty minutes later a child began to draw, and Gloria, curious, asked, “Oh, what’s that?” The child, without hesitation, responded, “It’s a gun, and it’s going to shoot...” Without breaking her calm, Gloria redirected the moment. “Oh my, no,” she said, her voice firm but kind, “we don’t want to draw any guns now.” The child erased the picture without protest; Gloria shot me a look, half wide-eyed, half grimaced, but with a twinkle of humor. In that moment, it was clear that her magic lies not in what she says, but in the deep well of love and patience from which she draws.

The room is an orchard of sound—chair legs scudding, crayons rattling, the A/C vent rattling above a shelf of phonics readers. Through it all, Gloria floats like dust mote in a shaft of morning sun—present but weightless, visible by grace of the light around her.

4 What the Program Means—and Doesn’t

The national Foster Grandparents Program was launched in 1965 under the banner of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, pairing low-income seniors with at-risk children. Volunteers receive a modest stipend—barely enough for gas but adequate to satisfy the government that participants are not employees. 

Martin Tichenor—regional director, executive-grade optimism and clip-board—explains that Spainhower’s young scholars often come from generational turbulence: addiction, foster care, food insecurity. “Grandma Gloria gives them a grandmother on demand,” he says, “and they treat her like sacrament.” He tells me about bringing volunteers into the county jail for a literacy project: “The moment those orange jumpsuits see a grey-haired lady with a name tag that says Grandma, the whole cellblock goes Sunday-school quiet. It’s reflex. You don’t cuss at grandma.”

The program manual forbids corporal discipline, forbids religious instruction, forbids hugging in the classroom. Gloria signs those compliance forms annually, but culture is stronger than clauses; her hugs are grandmother hugs—quick squeeze, pat-pat, release—and no administrator has yet dared challenge their legality.

5 Thursday Afternoon Grocery Aisle Theology

Gloria’s work doesn’t end in the classroom. As she moves about town—at the grocery store, on the sidewalk—children from the current crop and years past will spot her, squeals “Grandma!” launching across slick tile into a collision worthy of minor-league baseball. Gloria braces, bends, absorbs momentum without visible strain, ready for a hug. “We’re huggers around here,” she says with a smile. But there are rules in the classroom, and while the hugs are frequent outside school walls, inside the classroom, she respects the boundaries.

6 What Keeps Her Going

Even saints tire. Some evenings Gloria lowers herself into a vintage recliner, ankles swelling like yeasted dough, and wonders how many more winters the joints will allow kneeling on kindergarten-height carpets. She does not voice such doubts aloud. Asked why she keeps at it, she shrugs: “I like to be needed. The Lord gave me breath this morning—may as well use it.”

There is, too, the inheritance of habit. Her mother, Edna, sewed quilts for tornado victims, canned fifty quarts of tomatoes each August “in case somebody’s pantry goes bare.” Gloria’s grandmother probably nursed influenza victims in 1918 with nothing but turpentine and hope. Service was a generational dialect in her childhood household; to abandon it would feel like apostasy.

7   The Surprise Gift

At the end of my time with Gloria, passing her the $1,000 cash seemed as natural as taking a breath. At first she just stared at the money, eyes wide, like it was a coiled snake ready to strike. I assured her there were no strings attached; she could do whatever she wanted with it. She said “Oh my goodness” so many times it sounded like a mantra. 

After reeling off several possibilities for where the money could go, she came back to the children. “I’ll spend this on the kids,” she said. The most immediate target: an upcoming Halloween party. With a $1,000 to spend, that party will go down as legendary.

8 An Afternoon Walk and Farewell

I drove south toward Sedalia, Spainhower’s school bell fading behind. Ahead lay Oklahoma winds, Arkansas pines, Alabama cotton, the staggered homestretch back to Brenda and a couple of already decorated Christmas trees. I adjusted the rearview mirror and, for five minutes, watched the courthouse dome shrink like a penny dropped down a well. Shadows stretched across harvested fields; crows lifted in lazy swirls from fencerows; the sky prepared its next sermon of weather.

Long after egg cartons become compost and crayons wear to nubs, long after the Vanagon’s tires trace other counties, the echo of Gloria’s patience will still hum in that kindergarten like bees in summer clover. And some grown man or woman, years ahead, will remember a grey-haired lady who knelt to tie a sneaker, who breathed hope into spelling tests, who showed that the world could break your heart and still leave you capable of love.

There’s a saying that the greatest among us are those who serve, and by that measure, Gloria Evans stands among the greatest. She may not think of herself in those terms—she’s far too humble for that—but the community knows. They know the power of her presence, the way her kindness has touched so many lives. 

Big gestures don't matter out here. Recognition, if it comes at all, is in the quiet, steady acts of love and service. And in those acts, Gloria has found her place, her purpose. She’s not just “Grandma” to the kids at Spainhower Primary; she’s Grandma to a whole town, and Marshall, Missouri, is richer for it.

1 · October on the Odometer

I left South Carolina in the bright crackle of early October 2024 with only one instruction drifting from the porch where Brenda waved me off: “Be home by Christmas.” I promised, thumb to the brim like a half-baked cowboy, then pointed Josie toward the Blue Ridge escarpment.

The Hope & Generosity Tour had no sponsors beyond a prayer and a promise of help from the folks at GoWesty should I get jammed up on the side of the road in NoWheresville and a grease-stained envelope of road money. The route was a loose noose: Carolina crests into Ohio for the Bob Evans Farm Festival, west across Indiana soybean, Illinois prairie, then angling south-west through Missouri before dropping into Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and at last closing the loop back to the Atlantic pine barrens before December twenty-fifth. A harvest season ride, three months long, cut from the cloth of wanderlust and stitched with Brenda’s Christmas deadline.

By the middle of that first month, I had already rolled north over fog-caught Appalachians, watched maples kindle like match heads, and drifted across the Ohio River into a drizzle that smelled of sausage grease and funnel-cake oil. I shook hands with a hundred strangers, scribbled half as many stories, then pivoted west, driving days defined by corn stubble and radio static. Indiana blurred, Illinois flattened, and somewhere beyond the Kaskaskia the land began to breathe deeper—the long, slow diaphragm of the Missouri prairie rising to meet a sky big enough to lose your name in.

That same sky was busy assembling trouble.

2 · Barometers and Borderlines

On a late October morning, the barometer in my head dropped two notches somewhere west of Sedalia. The air thickened, the horizon hazed. High cirrus stretched above like pulled taffy, and the wind veered south, damp and urgent. Longtime plainsfolk can feel such shifts in their knee joints; I felt it in the Vanagon’s steering, a subtle wander as gusts toyed with her squared shoulders.

I rumbled north on U.S. 65, that old freight trail connecting Arkansas to Iowa, and the country opened wide: soybeans already harvested, stalks pale as straw; corn sheared to ankle-high stubs; the ground waiting for winter’s first freeze. Grain elevators squatted at lonely crossroads, each with its own rust-striped water tower proclaiming a hopeful town: Houstonia, Malta Bend, Gilliam.

Forty miles short of Marshall, the sky dimmed as though someone had laid a blacksmith’s apron over the sun. A low rumble vibrated through the floor pan. The weather app, lagging by minutes, pinged a severe-storm warning for Saline County. I thumbed the notification away; there are moments when silicon feels like gossip compared to the ancient honesty of thunder.

3 · The Great Midwestern Overture

A Midwestern thunderstorm is a carnival of the elemental, and this one began with the classic overture: air gone electric, hair lifting on the knuckles that gripped the wheel; a smell of tin and clover and something metallic—ozone, they tell you, but it might as well be destiny.

First came those scout drops—big, warm, hesitant splats on the windshield—followed by a hush so complete I could hear the fan belt whine. Then the deluge of a billion drops hit like sheet iron. Rain thick enough to shave with slammed onto Josie’s roof, drowning the wipers on the second pass. Visibility shrank to mere feet; ditches on either side filled within seconds, water racing like newborn creeks toward some unseen river.

Lightning cracked overhead so near the white flash lit the van’s cabin, freezing the world frame-by-frame. After each burst the landscape vanished to ink, and the thunder that followed felt amphibious—part sky, part earth, part heartbeat.

I eased onto the shoulder, hazard lights blinking futile Morse code against the curtain of water. There we sat, machine and man, waiting for the sky to finish singing. Inside, the air smelled of damp upholstery and my own quickened pulse. Outside, the Midwest flexed its power: a chorus of wind and rain, voice of land too flat to deflect anything heaven decides to drop.

Thirty minutes—that’s what it took for the squall to pass. The thunder rolled east, the rain throttled back to a ragtime patter, and sunlight muscled through ragged cloud seams like gold syrup. Steam drifted off the pavement in gauzy banners. Every leaf from every sycamore along the fencerow glittered with new polish. The land looked rinsed, rebaptized.

I turned the key. Josie barked once and settled into her work-song idle. We pulled back onto 65, tires hissing through sheet water, and I thought: If that isn’t church, what is?

4 · First Sight of Marshall

Ten miles later a green sign announced MARSHALL CITY LIMITS. Elevation eight hundred ninety-three. Population ten thousand three hundred-odd, give or take the last census and the next funeral.

Established 1839, seat of Saline County since ‘40, and named for Chief Justice John Marshall—these are facts you can Google in less time than it takes to sip cold coffee. But facts alone won’t nudge your heart the way the town coming into view does: a water tower announcing its presence to the world, grain silos shining damply, and beyond them the faint spire of a courthouse clocktower rising above a quilt of oak canopies.

I rolled downtown on Arrow Street, easing brakes still wet from storm water. The square introduced itself by sound first: the stutter of tires over brick pavers, the faint chime of the courthouse bell marking half-past two, and the slosh of run-off gurgling through cast-iron street drains.

Marshall’s historic core is four tight blocks of late-19th-century brick—rows of two- and three-story buildings in Italianate, Romanesque, and plain utilitarian Midwestern styles. There’s a display case fogging with steam as new trays of cinnamon rolls cool; a barber shop, pole spinning since Eisenhower, and a used appliance sales/service center selling GE refrigerators alongside replacement belts for Maytag washers built before disco.

The Saline County Courthouse, anchored at the center, is a square limestone mass with arched windows and a copper roof that weather has kissed to green over the decades. I circled the block, tires rumbling like distant thunder across 140-year-old bricks, then found a parking slot beside a faded mural of Jim the Wonder Dog—Marshall’s canine prophet of Depression-era fame, who allegedly understood commands in several languages and once picked the winner of the Kentucky Derby. A plaque beneath the mural invited visitors to stroll a small memorial garden two blocks north. 

I stepped out into air that smelled of petrichor and yeast—storm and fresh bread commingled. The sky overhead still growled now and again, but the worst had marched off toward the low bluffs of the Missouri River thirty miles distant.

5 · History Underfoot

Walking the square after a thunderstorm is like walking a museum after closing: everything hushed, polished, more vivid for being damp. The courthouse lawn gleamed verdant; puddles in sidewalk seams mirrored the clocktower. I paused at a bronze marker noting The Battle of Marshall, October 13 1863, when Confederate raider J. O. Shelby slammed into 1,800 Union soldiers garrisoned here, ending his 40-day “Great Raid” across Missouri. Casualties were few, the plaque assured, but bullet scars left brilliant traces and still freckle limestone on the northwest corner of the courthouse if you know where to look. 

Across the street, Baity Hall of Missouri Valley College loomed like a red-brick castle beyond an avenue of sugar maples. Founded 1889—older than the Model T, younger than the light bulb—the college brought Presbyterian earnestness and a rotating infusion of youth to this farm town. Its bell tower tolled on the quarter hour, more measured than the courthouse chime, as though academia keeps its own calendar separate from the county clerk’s. 

The railroad once sliced two blocks south, carrying carloads of corn, hogs, and milled timber to St. Louis and beyond. Now only a weed-choked spur remains, the main line rerouted or abandoned. But the grain economy persists: thirty-foot augers hummed at the edge of town where trucks lined up, cabs still flecked with storm mud, waiting to dump yellow harvest into concrete silos.

I ducked inside S&P’s Diner—smell of bacon grease and dish soap—and choose a stool at the gleaming stainless steel counter that sits on a red and white checked vinyl tile floor. A gallery of children’s crayon artwork plastered behind the counter. Before I’d even settled in a waitress had a mug and a pot of coffee at the ready, as if she’d read my mind. I nodded and she poured. 

“You ain’t from around here,” she said with a head nod toward Josie, “but you beat the rain, so the day’s lookin’ up.” We chatted about the weather, like all Missourians do; she pronounced the storm “a whopper” and predicted good yields for wheat because thunderstorms “stir nitrogen in the soil.” I nodded as though I had known that all along.

I ordered a staple, biscuits and sausage gravy; it tasted like gratitude. I thanked Donna, paid in damp bills, stepped back onto the street just as the clouds parted further, letting sunlight bounce off wet brick until the square glowed like a memory.

6 · Jim the Wonder Dog and Other Legends

Curiosity lured me to the Jim the Wonder Dog Memorial Garden two blocks off the square. The rain-washed sidewalk smelled of boxwood. Bronze Jim sat frozen mid-point, gazing at some eternal quail. Children’s chalk sketches ringed the base: rainbows, paw prints, the word “WONDER” in careful capitals.

Legend says Jim could obey commands in foreign tongues, signal winners at baseball games, and pick a lady’s favorite flower from a bouquet by reading her mind. Whether dog or hoax or something in between, the town treats him like a departed uncle who once pulled quarters from behind your ear: skeptical outsiders can scoff, but the locals know magic when they’ve lived beside it. Each May they host Wonder Dog Day, parade and all, proving that Marshall refuses to cede wonder to the cynicism of larger cities. 

I sat on a bench, letting sunshine wick moisture from my clothes, and realized storms and legends share a kinship: both arrive uninvited, both leave an electricity in the air, and both remind you that not everything needs explanation.

7 · Dusk After Cleansing

As evening approached, rooftops steamed like loaves fresh from an oven, and the air gathered the smell of lawns mowed, then rained on. A church bell called vespers somewhere west of the square; diesel semis downshifted on Highway 65, heading for sedate motel lots on the far edge of town.

I drove Josie out College Street past the stadium lights of Missouri Valley—purple lavenders of sunset glancing off aluminum bleachers—then looped north toward Indian Foothills Park, 325 acres of oak woodland rolling above a lagoon still rippling from afternoon deluge. Families in pickup beds tossed bread to ducks; high-school couples lingered under a covered shelter seasoning their talk with shy laughter. Under the picnic pavilion, city workers had propped surplus sandbags—insurance against the Lamine River’s next tantrum.

Daylight slipped behind the western treeline, and the cicadas revved up like chainsaws left idling in the dark. I parked at a bluff and watched the last scraps of cloud smear lavender, salmon, violet across a sky newly scrubbed by the storm. Town lights flickered on: the courthouse clock face, marquee bulbs outside the Martin Community Center, sodium-vapor glow from the grain elevator where night crews rattled augers.

The thunderstorm that had bullied the prairie just hours earlier now rumbled low on the eastern horizon, a discontented stomach moving toward St. Louis. Its backside flashed occasional heat lightning—silent fireworks winking farewell. In its wake, Marshall exhaled: gutters cleared, dust settled, the hard edges of drought softened by a million thirsting roots.

8 · October Ledger

I wrote that night by headlamp in Josie’s cramped bunk:

Day 26 on the road. Mileage 1,782. Storm over Saline County baptized both land and traveler. Town of Marshall: brick, history, starch-pressed courtesy. Thunder swept the sky; bakery swept cinnamon across the square. Remember the smell of rain and yeast together—like communion wafers and wine of the ordinary.

I noted also: Looking for someone I haven’t met yet. Because stories travel faster than vans, and I’d heard rumors of a woman in this town who stitched generations together with little more than crayons, soft rebuke, and bottomless patience. But meeting her would have to wait for morning.

The storm had left its lullaby in my ears—drip of branches, soft gurgle of water under the curb. Josie creaked, settled. I drifted to sleep imagining the Midwest always breathing like this: inhaling storm, exhaling quiet; cracking wide open in lightning only to close ranks again under a quilt of star-shot darkness.

9 · Sunrise Over Baity Hall

Morning of October 23 sprouted with a cardinal’s bark and a periwinkle sky still streaked by thin cirrus, as if the night shift of clouds had refused to leave. I brewed camp coffee on the van’s butane stove—two scoops of grounds, water left hot by habit—and sipped while watching sunrise gild the limestone angles of Baity Hall at Missouri Valley. The bell rang seven crisp notes; a girl slid by on a longboard clutching a calculus text bigger than her torso. Tractors already hummed in distant fields, the harvest urgency renewed by yesterday’s rain.

I packed notebook, camera, a pouch of colored pencils someone had gifted at the Indiana state line, and pointed myself back toward the courthouse square. The world smelled clay-rich and newborn. Every puddle mirrored the sky, as though the ground had grown eyes overnight.

10 · Into the Day of Promise

Past S&P’s Diner where the waitress waved a coffee pot like a semaphore signal for returning wanderers. A bread truck idled unloading racks of sourdough. Two men in seed-company caps argued amiably beside a flatbed piled with soybean sacks. Everyday commerce resumed in gears newly greased by rain.

I scribbled details: barn-red Coke thermometer on the feed-store wall, chalkboard outside the library advertising a Wednesday quilting circle, the faint smell of distillate when a CSX freight growled south on the remaining spur.

The route ahead—west toward Kansas then south through the Plains—waited patiently, but I lingered. There was still someone here I needed to find, someone whose legend, I was told, could match any thunderstorm for power though she spoke softer than drizzle. The morning sun rose behind the courthouse dome, haloing the weather vane. I checked my watch, adjusted the strap on my backpack, and turned up College Street toward the elementary school, heart drumming a rhythm learned in rain.

I had rolled into Marshall, Missouri, looking for someone I hadn’t met yet—and the town, fresh-scrubbed and steaming under a hatchling sun, seemed ready to make introductions.

It’s also the place called “home,” by Gloria Evans, a saint of woman who performs miracles on a daily basis.

Josie is likely older than half the trees planted along the two-lane backroads she patrols. Forty-plus years of wind, ice, and heat have scrubbed her Assuan Brown paint to the faint color of river mud after a drought; her Samos Beige roof leans toward bone-white, like an aging mare’s muzzle. She is slow out of the gate on cold mornings, coughs a little gray when the throttle sticks, and purrs only when she’s certain you’re paying attention. I have learned to love all of it—the quivering dash vents, the small cauliflower rust blooming at side panel, the woolly rattle of the rear suspension—because you cannot love a creature halfway and hope it stays with you on hard roads.

People ask if it’s practical to pilot a 1982 Vanagon on a journey measured in thousands of two-lane miles. I shrug. Practicality and romance rarely keep the same address. Anyway, Josie is no machine in the sterile sense of pistons obeying commands. She is a traveling companion with opinions, mood swings, and the occasional need to shout for help in whatever language old machinery speaks. Learn that tongue, and she will carry you farther than common sense allows.

1 · The First Sign

It happened on a sun-soaked Wednesday somewhere in the soft belly of southern Ohio, fallow fields fanned out like brown quilts under an October sky. No storm in sight. No hint of weather of any kind. I came up to a crossroads, pressed the clutch, slipped the van into neutral, and rolled to a lazy stop behind a John Deere pulling a hay rake. In that moment of standstill I heard the unmistakable swack-swack of windshield wipers. Rubber blades hissed across dry glass, leaving ghost arcs of dust. Twice. Three times.

I stared at the wiper stalk, untouched. Switched off. Swack-swack. They stopped mid-stroke, paused, then resumed as if to say, We’re not done, pal. The farmer’s tractor pulled away; I eased back onto the blacktop with Josie’s eyebrows still flapping. Bump, rattle, another bump—swack-swack-swack—this time a marathon of motion, wipers thrashing at invisible rain for the next thirteen miles. They ignored the kill switch. They ignored my curses. They would have ignored a court order.

Machines as old as Josie do this. They don’t malfunction; they perform omens.

2 · Dial-a-Vanagon

I did what any sensible man would do: I called Steve, my personal Vanagon chaplain back in Marietta, Georgia, keeper of a battle-scarred ’82 Vanagon with a color scheme that made his van and Josie look like twins. He picked up on the second ring, breathless, probably elbow-deep in grease.

“Talk to me.”

“Wipers,” I said. “They’ve found religion.”

He chuckled. “Check the ground under the dash—brown wire near the clutch pivot. Could be chafed and shorting.”

“Right, OK,” I said, though I had only the vaguest picture of where clutch levers and wiring harnesses mingle. But in the fraternity of vintage-VW pilgrims, you never dismiss a hunch. Especially when delivered in Steve’s soothing low country, north of Atlanta drawl.

3 · Yoga Under a Glove Box

I pulled onto the apron of an abandoned filling station—retro SOHIO sign still creaking, weeds waist-high where gasoline once pooled—and commenced a series of contortions no doctor would recommend. Picture a middle-aged man on his back, shoulders wedged against brake pedal, feet dangling out the driver’s door like forgotten socks, halogen flashlight clamped in teeth. From that absurd perspective, the under-dash world looked like a copper rain forest: loom of wires, dangling bullet connectors, and dust bunnies hardened to fossils.

Steve’s brown ground wire appeared intact. My vertebrae did not. I groaned, flexed, and the flashlight beam skittered past the fuse box to the bottom of the steering column. Something there glistened. I blinked, angled light again. The rubber collar at the wheel’s base was wet—sticky, not rainwater. Brake fluid.

Brake fluid belongs nowhere near the bottom of a steering wheel. It should sit inside a reservoir two feet higher, piped to distant drums and calipers and the hydraulic clutch. Instinct throttled the heart. I wriggled free, popped the dash-top service hatch, and found the culprit: a plastic fluid reservoir drained to the MIN line. One more commute and I’d have been piloting 4,000 pounds of German nostalgia with the stopping power of a sled on black ice.

“Wipers my foot,” I muttered. “You clever, cranky girl.”

I fetched a dusty bottle of DOT4 from the emergency crate—thank God for over-packing—topped off the reservoir, and pumped the brakes and worked the clutch. Josie burped a sigh. The wipers, suddenly satisfied, folded themselves dutifully at the base of the windshield and never moved again unless properly beckoned.

4 · Coincidence, Providence, or Something Between

A rational man calls it coincidence. A wire short halfway across Ohio. An unrelated leak a foot away. But I’ve counted too many so-called coincidences that saved my hide: a sudden fuel-pump squeal thirty seconds before the engine starved on a mountain grade, revealing a pinched fuel line; an at-speed encounter with a massive pothole at dusk, forcing a roadside inspection that uncovered loose CV bolts that needed retorquing. Patterns emerge. Either the van is haunted by benevolent spirits of departed VW mechanics, or these old machines develop a sense of self-preservation that includes preserving the idiot behind the wheel.

Steinbeck wrote of his Rocinante that “a man on a trip soon comes to feel that his car is something more than a machine; it is an extension of himself. But in this case, Rocinante took on personality and the aura of a companion.” I agree with the intimacy. Machines at this age speak—a language of squeaks, flickers, and phantom wipers. Ignore it and pay the scrapyard.

5 · Anatomy of a Leak

Later, parked by a cornfield striped gold in late afternoon, I traced the leak. The reservoir perches behind the instrument cluster, feeding two metal lines that vanish through the floor to the brake master cylinder and the clutch master cylinder, the latter perched directly parallel to the rubber boot at the base of the steering wheel. Age hardens the rubber grommets; vibration cracks them. Brake fluid, thin as guilt, spits out and onto that rubber boot. An eventuality that nearly every Vanagon owner meets at some point. Josie wasn’t throwing a tantrum; she was ringing the fire bell with the only lever available—a phantom short in the wiper circuit that shared a ground path with the failing switch beneath the brake fluid float. Symphony of wiring harness and hydraulics, conducted by entropy.

She had my attention now. Replacing the clutch master cylinder was no roadside project, it would have to wait until the journey was over. I promised Josie I’d attend to the job first thing once safely back in the warmth of her garage. Meanwhile, I would watch the brake fluid level like an expectant parent and top it off when needed and pray the clutch master cylinder would hold up that long.

6 · What Machines Teach

That night in the bunk, I revised my private creed of mechanical companionship:

1. Machines remember—every patch, every shortcut—and they will call you to account.
   
   
2. Machines warn—rarely in plain speech. Learn the grammar of groans.
   
   
3. Machines forgive—if met with patience and a 13mm socket.
   
   
4. Machines conspire—to keep you humble, alive, and occasionally mystified.
   
   

Josie’s wiper prophecy bought me time and maybe my neck. For that I rested a hand on the steering wheel hub, sticky with cleaned brake fluid, and whispered thanks. Silly, perhaps, to thank steel and plastic. Yet gratitude, like oil, loses nothing for being poured on what cannot speak.

7 · Rolling Faith

In the days that followed, the van behaved—no random blade thrashing, no new leaks. But I found myself listening harder to every warp and woof of her engine. I carried that vigilance into human encounters too—leaning close when a farmer complained about drought, noticing the tremor in a waitress’s smile. Machines had schooled me again in the art of subtle signals.

We rolled west across the Indiana line, soy giving way to corn, corn to wheat, wheat to low brown prairie where sky attends church all day long. Every few days I unscrewed the brake-fluid cap, peered inside, and filled, as needed. Josie purred approval. Sometimes, to test my luck, I flicked the wiper stalk on an empty road—one gentle swish, then off—like checking in with an oracle whose message I’d finally heeded.

8 · Final Miles to the Sunset

Sunset painted the horizon bruise-purple as I climbed the last hill before camp near Lake Carlyle. Josie’s high beams cut twin cones through bug-spattered glass. She hummed at fifty-five, the herbal cadence of an air-cooled heart that knows exactly how much it can give and no more.

And I, hands loose on the wheel, felt the curious peace that follows averted disaster: awareness of mortality sharpened to beauty. Roadside shrines of Queen Anne’s lace glowed ghost-white in the headlights; the scent of a hay field drifted through half-open wing windows. Below the dash the leaky cylinder seals held up, waiting for full repair at a later date, a treaty that would hold until the next act of mechanical prophecy.

Because there will be a next act. Old vans, like old men, do not surrender the stage quietly. They cough to get your attention, tap your shoulder at midnight, or drag windshield wipers across a bone-dry windshield under an unblemished sky. When that happens I’ll mutter, reach for tools, and thank the gods of grease and grit that Josie still bothers to speak.

Machines can’t save a soul, but they might extend its lease long enough to see another county fair, another sunrise through a buggy windshield, another stranger waving because they recognize kinship in imperfection. That’s romance enough for any road, old or new.

I killed the engine, coasted into camp, and let the headlights die last—two small moons blinking out so the real sky could take over. In the silence before sleep, I thought I heard windshield wipers whisper once. Just once. A lullaby of rubber on glass, reminding me to listen, always listen, to the stories a machine tells when words are not enough.

1 · Finding the Door

Away from the countryside, where the hum of the city’s machinery fades and the air grows thick with the smell of damp soil and hay, I’d found myself on a brief sojourn to the hamlet of Gallipolis, Ohio. I rolled Josie down a broken street—Monday morning, gray light, the Vanagon’s engine coughing out the night’s chill—and smelled damp wood smoke and river mud. For three days I’d idled in this French-named town waiting on a back-ordered prescription, walking the levee, counting barges shoving coal north. I was restless, coffee-starved, and half-mad for conversation that wasn’t my own echo.

A place called "Poppy's Coffee, Tea, and Remedies" sat just off the road, tucked into a row of local establishments located downtown. Its hand-painted, modest sign beamed out an inviting vibe to all wanderers, wayfarers, and souls who’ve lost their way.

I killed the ignition, patted Josie’s dash, and stepped into drizzle. As I opened the door, a small faded note in the corner of the plate glass window caught my eye: Food Pantry Inside for Children & Homeless—Come In and Just Ask. I filed the notice in the mental junk drawer where curiosities rattle until they demand inspection.

The door creaked like a hymnbook hinge. Inside, low Edison bulbs glowed orange over plank floors scarred by decades of boot heels, offering up a cozy, homey atmosphere. One whole wall boasts handwritten greetings and well-wishes—pilgrims from Memphis, Mumbai, Marietta—layer upon layer like graffiti in a boxcar church. Steam curled from an espresso wand; the shop smelled of cinnamon, fresh baked bread and wet wool.

Before I could find a corner table, a mountain of a man loomed beside me, wiping hands on a burlap towel. “Mornin’. I’m Greg Hill—folks call me Poppy. What can I brew ya?”

Six-four if an inch. Beard a tangle of iron filings shading to silver. Big paws, but eyes soft as river silt. The contradiction disarmed me. I ordered coffee, black. He nodded like that answered larger questions.

2 · Four Requests and a Question

I’d planned to edit some pictures and my rat’s nest of notes, but the shop itself became the study. Within the first hour of sitting in the place, no less than four people came in looking for some kind of handout, free food (not from the pantry), free coffee, or both. Each request was met with an upbeat, warm, and inviting greeting—the kind that passes for everyday fare in small towns. No cash register rang for those transactions; compassion moved in quieter currency.

And that's when I knew there was more behind this coffee shop than its bookshelf full of homeopathic remedies. I knew I had to know more about this place serving as an unassuming front for something much bigger than first met the eye. 

It was a better story than I could have imagined...

You see, it wasn't long ago that Greg and his wife, Lori, stood at the helm of something most wouldn’t associate with virtue. They ran the largest porn and head shop in town—a place that carried the dark, seedy secrets of men and women looking to fill the empty hours. But that was years ago. Life, they’d tell you, takes unexpected turns, and sometimes you find salvation in the places you least expect. Almost overnight, they found a faith that turned their lives completely around. They sold out of the incredibly lucrative porn trade and took over a struggling coffee shop. 

3 · From Porn to Psalms

The first week in charge they cleared some shelf space in the shop’s eight-foot-by-ten office—and stocked it with cereal and other dry goods. “We figured five, ten neighbors might stop by,” Greg said. “The Lord had bigger math.” Word spread; bags of beans and diapers crowded every corner. When the closet burst, they rented the vacant storefront next door, then another. Lori filed paperwork, and Court Street Ministries was born—food pantry, hot-meal kitchen, clothing room, prayer booth, all wedged into three adjoining buildings on Court Street. (Court Street Ministries - WhyHunger)

Every Thursday, volunteers ladle chili and dish out USDA surplus to more than three hundred clients—families, veterans, and the lonely. Lines snake down the block. Expenses hover near desperation, but “somehow,” he grinned, “God restocks freezers when we’re down to frost.”

4 · Lori in Motion

While Greg narrated, Lori buzzed around the coffee shop. Between bites I watched her orchestrate a ballet of charity—answering phone, jotting volunteer schedules, correcting a coffee order, signing delivery invoices—all without misplacing her smile.

It’s Lori who keeps the engine running here, a one-woman dynamo who, alongside Greg, manages not just Court St. Ministries but also the cozy little coffee shop that has become a sanctuary for the town’s wanderers. And somehow she finds time to volunteer at the local Lion's Club and Rotary Club. 

Lori is the kind of woman you meet once in a lifetime. Tireless and resolute. she moves through the coffee shop with the surety of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing and why. She’s quick to give, but she’s no pushover. There’s a balance in her heart—an understanding that while charity must flow freely, it must also inspire those who receive it to give back. I watched as she gently admonished one long-time “patron” of the coffee shop—a man who had taken from the kindness of others long enough.

“It’s time to start giving back,” she said, her voice soft but firm. “Be here Thursday. We need help feeding those folks, and you’re gonna be part of the crew.”

Her words were not a command, but an invitation to join something greater than oneself. And maybe that’s what makes Lori and Greg so special. They see every soul as part of the community, not just recipients of charity but participants in the grand story they’re writing, one meal at a time.

5 · The Envelope in My Pocket

I carry a dozen envelopes on this tour, each fat with a $1,000 stack of 50 $20 bills. I opted for stacks of 20’s because I liked the heft of it. Handing over ten 100 bills seemed, well, rather slim. I stashed them in a banker’s pouch and put them in a secret compartment under Josie’s driver’s seat. 

The plan: find twelve nodes of hope, quietly seed each with a thousand dollars, record what sprouts. No press releases, no tax receipts. Just a handshake of currency.

Ten days of travel, and I had yet to choose the first recipient. I’d talked myself into prudence, waiting for some perfect narrative. Greg and Lori’s coffee shop offered up rust-belt generosity—my ribs hummed yes. Yet I hesitated. Would money sully the grace already in motion? Would it embarrass them?

I spent the day touring the Court St. Ministries facilities. What had started as a part-time pantry and blossomed into a full-time commitment. There were now three entire buildings given over to storing food, one had freezers stuffed in every corner to hold the spare USDA meat that came in. I winched thinking about the electric bill. In addition to the coffee shop, there was also a thrift store–no charge for anything taken if you could’t afford it.

Lori admitted that sometimes supplies ran thin. “God finds a way to provide,” Greg said. “Always has, always will.” The envelope in my pocket grew heavier by the syllable.

7 · What a Thousand Dollars Buys

At the end of the day I sat down with Greg and Lori to thank them for their time, generosity and hospitality. I told them they were exactly the kind of people the Hope & Generosity Tour was looking for. “For all you do, and because I know you never ask for anything in return, I’d like to give you this,” I said, sliding the fat $1,000 slack their way. “It’s a thousand dollars, cash, no strings attached. Do whatever you want with it. Keep it, give it away or buy something for somebody. You know where the need lies better than I do.” 

Their eyes welled up. Greg caught his breath and told me the story of George Muller who, at the turn of the century, took in and cared for hundreds of orphans. He never asked for money. “The lord always provided,” Greg said, wiping a tear away. “We’ve been wondering how we pay the electric bill for those freezers,” he said. “We hadn’t told anyone.” He held the stack of 20s aloft like a loaves-and-fishes prop. “God just provided,” he said. 

8 · Afternoon Debrief

As I was headed back out to Josie, crickets sang; humidity clung. Lori intercepted me and asked if I could use a “real bed,” a shower and a place to stay for the night. I know enough to never turn down the hospitality of strangers. Turns out that they have a refurbished one-bedroom apartment above the main Court St. Ministries building that they use just for such occasions. I gratefully accepted their offer. 

9 · Leaving Court Street

Next morning I found Lori rattling around in the coffee shop’s small, tidy kitchen. She pressed a paper sack into my hands—scones and prayers folded like origami cranes. “Road fuel,” she winked. 

I rolled south along the river. In the rearview, Court Street shrank to a pin, but the envelope’s echo filled the van. One thousand dollars—fifty $20 bills—had evaporated into the electric bill, enough to keep the freezers running one more month. Yet the gift grew heavier as miles accrued: weight measured not in currency but consequence.

10 · Reflections on a Billfold Sacrament

Money is a peculiar sacrament. Give it to a stranger at a gas station and it buys silence. Give it to Court Street Ministries and it multiplies—into Thursday chili, into volunteer purpose, into dignity for a man washing pans for the first time instead of waiting for a handout. Steinbeck’s Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath says, “Wherever there is a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.” But sometimes you aren’t there; you hand your fight to someone better placed.

Greg and Lori will still scramble for rent next month. My envelope was a breath, not a resurrection. Yet breath is what keeps a body moving between miracles. Maybe that is the Hope & Generosity Tour’s hidden thesis: become breath for lungs short on air, then move on before ego wants applause.

Josie rattled over a pothole, silverware clinking in the drawer. The Ohio shimmered beside us. I thought of the line: food pantry inside—just come in and ask. What a daring invitation: just ask. How many of us shrink from need because we fear request? Poppy’s door swings open five days a week, coffee steam mingling with vulnerability.

11 · Epilogue: Ledger of Another Thousand

I pulled onto a bluff overlook, cut the engine, watched barges muscle downstream. In my notebook I created a new page: Gallipolis, OH – Court Street Ministries – $1,000.

Below, a ledger not of dollars but echoes:

• freezer rent paid
  
  
• Porn king to prophet
  
  
• camo-jacket volunteer scheduled Thursdays
  
  
• pantry lights stay on one more month
  
  
• Hope never dies
  
  

I closed the book. The sun punched through cloud breaks, setting the river on fire. Somewhere back in Gallipolis Lori arranged cans by expiration date, Greg wiped counters, and someone in need walked through the door and mumbled shyly about whether the sign in the window offering food was true.

The thousand dollars no longer existed, yet it pulsed—an unseen current looping through the veins of a town too stubborn to quit the riverbank and too generous to let hunger claim its own.

Josie started on the second crank, as if eager to chase the next miracle. I shifted into gear, believing for the first time that my pocket held eleven more sunrises exactly like the one Court Street Ministries would greet tomorrow—doors unlocked, coffee brewing, faith stacked beside cans of green beans, ready for whoever just came in and asked.