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Pilgimage
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___Going home has many meanings to our family. To me, home has always meant Albuquerque, where I grew up and where my dad and other relatives still live.
___ But this last week, going home took on new meaning as we traveled on a pilgrimage back to Louisville, Ky., to visit friends and see our old haunts. Mark and I lived
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ALISON WINGFIELD
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half our married life in Louisville. With no family close by, we relied on our church family to help us weather the storms of life--including the birth of the twin tornadoes known as Luke and Garrett.
___ As usual, it was the little things that stirred our memories. We walked to a small park area near our first house and the boys lit up as they saw their favorite climbing tree. And when we drove by our second house, they pointed out where we had spent many hours playing baseball in the front yard.
___ What went through my mind was how much I miss our basement. Oh, for better soil in Dallas.
___ We ate at our favorite hamburger place, and I remembered the first time the boys got an iced cookie there. Most of the icing ended up on them instead of inside them.
___ When we visited our church and saw so many familiar faces (and I even remembered most of the names--quite a feat for me) I was overwhelmed with all we had experienced with these people.
___ God gives us family wherever we are. Now that we are living happily in Dallas, we are again discovering wonderful people who play a special role in our spiritual and family lives.
___ The boys put the trip in perspective when they said they wished we could live in a place that combined Kentucky and Texas, Dallas and Louisville. Kentexas or Dallasville were two of the names they suggested.
___ Sometimes it helps to see where you've come from to know where you're going.
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__With no disrespect to all our friends in Kentucky--whom we thoroughly enjoyed seeing--let the record show that this trip was not my idea. I wanted to stay home and paint a hallway and bathroom during spring break.
___But Alison and the boys had been insisting that we needed to make a pilgrimage back to our old Kentucky
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MARK WINGFIELD
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home. And I finally relented.
___ My hesitation was not based on any lack of interest in visiting Kentucky. Rather, it was based on a highly pragmatic reason--distance.
___ To maximize our time, we decided to drive straight through from Dallas to Louisville. I had done this once before (but by myself), and it seemed doable in my distant memory.
___ After our 16-hour entrapment in the car together, however, I realized my memory was foggy. It's a lot easier to control the intake and output of one passenger than of four. And to top it all off, we discovered that most of Arkansas is under construction, which meant much slower driving times. (A friend who is a former Arkansan suggested it's probably a good thing for Arkansas to be under any kind of construction.)
___ Had it not been for a really good book on tape that we all enjoyed listening to, we probably would have killed each other before we got to Kentucky. Meanwhile, I occasionally lectured the boys on how they'll look back with fondness on these family adventures when they're older. They didn't believe a word of it, even though I made several speeches worthy of Ward Cleaver.
___ And, in truth, it was the shared nature of the pilgrimage that made it worthwhile, because as we journeyed back into our past, we realized the best memories are the ones we hold together.
Mark Wingfield is managing editor of the Standard. Alison Wingfield is a freelance writer. The Wingfields moved to Texas from Louisville, Ky., where Mark had been editor of the Western Recorder, in which this column appeared weekly.
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