For ten years of my childhood, my family lived in the parsonage my parents rescued from the mice and disrepair. It was situated on a curve of Michigan Highway 60 (M-60) in the tiny village of Burlington where my parents hallowed out a congregation in that farm area of southern Michigan.
Gloria in front of the house on M-60
M-60 was the main truck route between the automobile plants in Detroit and the car markets of Chicago and beyond. This was before the Interstate Highway system, so M-60 was still a two lane road. In front of our house there was a line of mature, well-established hard maple trees that most of the time kept semis, loaded with cars, from crashing into our front porch when their drivers went to sleep at the wheel in the middle of the night.
Gloria and her sister
I say “mostly” because a few trucks managed to go between the maples, in which case our front porch became the barrier that protected our living room. Accidents on that curve were common enough that we had a family protocol for such emergencies. I was the youngest, so my job was to run to the linen closets for towels, blankets, and sheets. My sister Evelyn was a teen-ager who was assigned calling the ambulance and police, while mother and daddy ran to assess the injuries and do what they could to save lives until help could arrive. Sometimes this meant their trying to stop bleeding and cover the injured truckers with sheets and blanket for shock and for warming them against the cold of Michigan winters.
Sometimes the drivers were ejected on impact. Other times the drivers were brought out of the rain or snow to our living room floor if the truck was in danger of bursting into flames. Whatever it took, saving a life was the objective.
I remember one accident that happened during a torrential rain storm. The driver’s lip was split from his nose through his upper lip, causing such a loss of blood that my mother had to hold his lip together while Evelyn brought towels and blankets and Daddy covered them both with a tarp to keep the man from drowning in the rain and his own blood
One time a girlfriend of Evelyn’s was spending the night, when sometime around 2 am we heard the familiar crash into our stalwart maple trees. While we each ran to carry out our assignments, this girl began to scream and ring her hands and (as mother would say) run around like a chicken with its head cut off.
Mother stopped long enough to grab the hysterical girl by the shoulders, shake her to attention, and say, “Stop! How dare you? This is NOT about you. This is life and death. This is no time for you to demand attention! You can fall apart when this is over, but for now, we have lives to save!”
Gloria in Burlington
I was about six years old by then, but I never forgot that a crisis is no time to be hysterical. It was the time for self-control and unselfish behavior.
In the last few years, Bill and I have made the trip back to this tiny village and the church on M-60 my parents and that sweet congregation built there. The parsonage that my parents turned from a rat’s nest to a beautiful, welcoming home is still there. The porches that stretched across the front and side of the house are gone; just a small entry stoop remains. And I know why the wrap-around porches disappeared. They were lost in battle, sacrificed to a higher life-saving cause.
So many life lessons I learned in that house, in that little community, and in that church! Our family moved from there when I was fourteen, but it is the church we chose to go back to for our wedding when Bill and I were married. So much of what shaped me into the person he married and still am to this day happened in that place. But that is at least another book.
