The End of the Road

On Saturday, December 22, we reached our parish church and finished the Pilgrimage~this part of it anyway.

Welcome to the big city. You can see how densely populated it is.

First sign of civilization.

Finally, the business district!

A considerately placed restroom

Northwest Mississippi Community College Administration Building

Strayhorn! The street where my church lives

Across the street from the stop sign we find the water tower. It says "SENATOBIA *FIVE STAR CITY*"  I haven't been able to find out why it's the Five Star City or when or how it got that name, but in searching for the information, I found on Wikipedia that two movies that were partially filmed in Senatobia have been nominated for Academy Awards: The Client and The People vs. Larry Flynt.

I thought that when I got to this last half-mile stretch, I would be so excited that I would fly down the street. Well, I was wrong. I felt so exhausted that I told Bill that if it had been a day that wasn't the last day, I would have sat down in the middle of the sidewalk and told him to go get the car. And there were all these terrible obstacles like stairs on the sidewalks. Whoever thought of such a horrible thing? And if you look down the street, you can see that mountain rising up in the distance. 

St. Gregory the Great! Hurrah! You can see Mary off on the left.

Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and wise men and ox and ass and camel and sheep and angels (there were three) were waiting for us--and Jesus.

It's so convenient to have a key to the door of the church.

And Jesus was waiting for us! 

So that's it for now. Sometime soon we will head for Holy Spirit church in Hernando. 

AMDG

Almost There

O Root of Jesse
A standard to the peoples
Before whom kings are mute,
To whom all nations shall 
                                appeal--
Come to deliver us; delay, please, no longer.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I've posted pictures of the swamp that we drive through on the way to work, but there is another one that we pass on a two-lane highway on the way to church that is very, very beautiful in the spring and summer. A few years ago, work began to add another two lanes to the highway, and they filled in part of the swamp and built a huge berm between the highway and the swamp for the two new lanes. This really should be a good thing eventually because this road ends up under water--about 3 or 4 feet of water--every few years, but in the meantime I haven't seen the swamp for a long, long time. So, when we got to this part of the pilgrimage, I wanted to see if we couldn't walk on top of the berm, which would be safer than walking on the road and it would give us a view of the swamp. 

Well, it worked and we had a very pleasant walk. These pictures don't do it justice. The poor swamp is almost dry even after some recent rain storms. I imagine that during the late summer it was completely dry like most everything else.

The first bridge. I had been worried that the bridges might not be completed to the point where we could walk over them, but they were.

A beaver dam--you can see they've been busy felling trees.

I wish you could tell how big this tree is. Bill says it's about 100' tall.

Bill had parked the car at mid-point, so he had to leave me to move it to the end of the walk. I felt kind of bereft when he left.

This is a picture of the current highway. You can tell how much higher the new one will be. You can also see how low the water is, especially when you think that when it floods, it's 3 or 4 feet over the road. This ought to be a pretty view, but it looks pretty icky.

Near the end of the walk, we came to this post. It must be some sort of omen. 

Well, that's it. We walked 2.1 miles and it is exactly 2.1 miles from the place where we stopped to the church door. We hope to finish this weekend. Next up--the big city--Walmart and everything. 

AMDG

The Antepenultimate Stretch~We Hope

Last Sunday, we walked another 1.8 miles for a grand total of 11.1 miles. This is a good ways more than 2/3 of the way. I'm getting kind of excited. Sunday's walk was past the busiest area so far. Tessa walked with us again and we started here.

You can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them. They will still be blurry, but it's a cheap phone, a shaky old photographer, and a overcast day.

This was on the northwest corner, across from us. JJ's Discount Appliances-Doors-Windows-Flooring-and something that looks like Lawns, but surely that can't be right. 

On the northwest corner, Rodgers Funeral Home with many tombstones in front.

When Tessa was little, we were on the way to Mass one Sunday and she said, "Oh, that's so sad. Look how many people have died in that house.

I've always thought I'd like to have this house and now it's for sale. 

Of course, it's on a US highway and across the street from this.

 If you've been reading this blog for a while, you've seen that horse before here.  

Here's a better picture of his friend. After eating Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, he didn't have much use for granny's mattress.

That was just outside the second largest town in Tate County.

That business on the left used to be a great restaurant called The Copper Kettle. When it became Dr. Ba-Ba-Barbeque, I meant to get a picture of it, but I never had time to stop.

Then we passed these.

Your tax dollars at work.

About here, we met with a pretty strong headwind, and walking got to be less of a lark and more of a challenge.

The yellow-brick, uh, grey concrete road begins.

The days' journey ends.

Where we hope to be later today if it doesn't rain.

Look promising?

AMDG

Halfway

As of Sunday, we are officially over halfway on our pilgrimage to our parish. We walked 1.9 miles Sunday for a grand total of 9.3 miles out of 15. Not much by most standards but for someone who could only walk for ten minutes at a time a couple of months ago, this is pretty good. The picture above shows our stopping point. We have now reached a U.S. highway which is in parts wider than anyplace we've been before and compared with the roads we've passed is a veritable business hub, although there's a long empty space, too. Very soon we will pass a Walmart and know that we have truly reached the big city, population 8124 as of July 2011.

I mentioned before that we pray when we pass cemeteries. This is Magnolia Cemetery, but it's hard to read because the letters are hidden in a pine tree, which doesn't seem quite right. In fact, I don't think I see any magnolias there.

Here is the railroad that was just about at the 1.5 mile mark.

Our granddaughter Tessa, she of the beautiful smoke picture and the great snake adventure, walked with us, which was really nice.

Bill wears that orange hat so people can see him. Tessa just has her hair.

This was a nice-ish sort of place we passed along the way.

Nice-ish but out of focus.

Just as Bill left us to drive the car down to the end of the road, a pack of dogs came up over the side of the road opposite us. It is always thus. These things happen during the longest possible time Bill will be away from us. I was more concerned with sneaking past them quietly than taking a picture, but they looked fairly friendly. When we drove past them on the way back, I saw that they had puppies down below, so I'm glad the mother decided we were far enough away for them to be safe.

So, there you have it. I'm really eager to get back out and continue down the road.The funny thing about fractions is that it takes forever to get halfway, but we should reach the 2/3 point on the next walk. This is exciting! We can only make our pilgrimage on weekends because by the time we get home, it's too dark, so we have to walk closer to work. 

Of course, when we get to our parish, we have to turn around and walk from our parish to another church where I go to Mass occasionally, and then another, and another. But that's another story.

St. James, pray for us.

AMDG

Earlier I typed daughter instead of granddaughter when talking about Tess, but she is, of course, the latter.

Lions, and Tigers, and Bears, Oh My~Well Not Exactly

But it hasn't been all sweetness and light, and lovely pastoral idylls either.

Actually, we didn't really meet with many four-legged creatures on our last two walks on the pilgrimage. In fact, I think these were the only ones.

What we did come across on the first day was mosquitoes. Many mosquitoes. It was a bit surprising that after having walked through a fairly swampy area last week without molestation, we were greeted by this swarm along a flat, dry part of the road. Maybe there were some more of the little ponds like the one in the picture hiding behind little swells in the ground. But otherwise that was a pretty good day, although this did puzzle us a bit.

Maybe some disturbing statistics about literacy in Mississippi came out after they posted the first sign, or maybe we are expecting an influx of foreign tourists?

Sunday, was another story. I was really excited when we started out Sunday because we were walking through one of the prettiest stretches of road on our route, and because we were going to reach the halfway mark.

This was really gorgeous about two days before the walk when all the leaves where still on the trees, still, it's pretty.  I was a bit concerned about the drop-off on the side of the road because there was a lot of traffic and sometimes the visibility for oncoming cars is bad. The real problem was this:

See those indentations along the edge of the road? I'm not sure what purpose they are supposed to serve. I guess they are to warn people on dark nights that they are about to drive off the road, but it seems like it would be too late by the time you figured out what was going on. For most of the way, I had to walk with my left foot stepping in and between and around those bumps, and it was really difficult. And though I wasn't really cold, I got a terrible headache and earache about a half mile into the walk, and when I sat down to rest after just over a mile, I got such horrible muscle cramps in my leg that I had to stop .3 miles short of the halfway mark.

I was disappointed at first, but I was also thinking that this is what a real pilgrimage is like. Some days are really nice and some are just painful. So, we will just have to wait until next weekend to cross the halfway mark. There's still about a mile of those indentations left, so I'll have to think up something good to offer it up for. I'm thinking about getting some serious shoes, too--and something to cover my forehead. Now I'm wondering if part of the reason people wear those bands on their foreheads is to keep from getting headaches from the cold.

AMDG

Pilgrimage

A while back I wrote about the Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella and how I've been wanting to make the pilgrimage for a long, long time. Well, since we have neither the time or the money to do so for a couple of years, and since I had absolutely no stamina after being sick for about 3 months last fall and winter, not to mention my three eye surgeries, we thought we could at least begin to prepare so we would be ready when the time came. So, a couple of months ago we started walking. It's sort of embarrassing to admit this, but at that time I could only walk ten minutes at a time, five minutes out and five minutes back, and it completely wore me out. When I started working in 2005, I used to walk 3 miles every day, so this was really discouraging. 

Still, we had fun. We tried to walk in lots of different places between work and home. That's a 40 mile trip, so there are lots of places to walk. We walked in the zoo, by the Mississippi, from the seminary where I work to the college where Bill works, around the Mississippi welcome center on I-55, around the square in Hernando, MS, and up and down our very hilly street. Today we walked 43 minutes, so that's a great improvement.

Grumpy wrote me once about the pilgrimage that it doesn't start in one definite place. Different people start in different places, some start at their front door. So, I got to thinking that while I couldn't go to Spain yet, I could start a pilgrimage here, and walk from home to my parish church. That's about 15 miles. There's no way I could walk that at one time, so we are walking it a bit at a time. We can't walk on days when we work, because it's twilight by the time that we get home, so we can only walk weekends and hopefully we'll get in a few days this week when I'm off work if Bill can come home early.

So far, we have walked three times and covered 4.4 miles. Bill drops me off at place we stopped the day before and I start walking.. He drives the car down the road a mile or so, and then walks back to meet me about halfway, and then we walk to the car together. When we reach the car, we walk about half as far as I think I can walk, then he walks back to get the car while I keep walking. It's nice this way because we have each other's company for half the walk, and I can pray the rosary on the other half, and I don't worry about being so far from home by myself. The thing I worry most about is dogs. So far, though, we've only met up with friendly ones. This one walked with us yesterday.

I really liked this dog. She looks like a mix between a german shepherd and a lab. I almost wish I could take her home with me.

One thing I wanted to do was pray at the cemeteries we pass. There's a whole lot of dead folks out here and since they are probably 99.9999999% protestant, they've been lying around for a long time with nobody to pray for them. I always pray when I pass them in the car, but this is kind of special. This is the closest one to my house. It's across the street from the church which was our stopping point on the first day.

Last Saturday, our first day, and this Saturday, we walked past a bunch of small farms.

Some of them still busy, others barely there.

Sunday, we walked through some bottomland that's the favorite place for hunting in our area. There are a lot of tributaries of the Cold water river running through it. Here's one.

And here's another.

This is the time of year when they are carting away bales of cotton, and the roadsides look like this.

Sometimes there's quite a lot. Once when the river had flooded around this time of year, when the water went down all the tree branches were ringed with bits of cotton like girls with wreaths of white flowers in their hair. When we were homeschooling, I always thought a good homeschool mother would take her kids out to gather a bunch of that cotton and take it home and card and spin it, but I was a low-energy homeschool mother and I worried about all the pesticides and defoliant that had been sprayed on it, too.

Well, that's all for now. I'll probably write some more as we progress. Pray for us to stick with it. Every day it's a struggle to get started. I'd hate to lose all the ground we've gained so far.

AMDG