Thanksgiving Eve 32320

One of the nicest services in my memory is Thanksgiving Eve in Apalachicola. Two to three decades ago and details slip my mind, but for some years we ministers had it as a community service, moving around to different churches and always a big congregation. One year at Trinity Episcopal, First Baptist, St. Patrick Catholic, First UMC. One year we had it at a church out on Brownsville Road, either First Assembly of God or First Pentecostal Holiness, they are just a block or so apart and I can’t remember which. Pastor was a transplanted Canadian who had grown up Anglican and still secretely longed for it. One year we had it at the Love Center, an African-American holiness church, and it was nothing short of good, holy, exuberant, spirit-filled fun.

Eventually it died out, there was nothing for a year or two or three, then we tried a Thanksgiving Eve service just at Trinity, and it was well attended so we kept it going. Evening Prayer with lots of Thanksgiving hymns that people loved but only got to sing that one time a year. In a small town people can leave home, drive up and park, and fill up the church all in a period of five minutes. So no big deal getting to church and home.

The small size and relative isolation of the community made it family close, easy and enjoyable for local things to happen. And for old culture to cling, people liked things as they were and always had been. When Linda, Tass and I moved there in 1984 we found Apalachicola the same as it had been forty years earlier when I went there often with my father in his fish truck to buy oysters and shrimp.

Things change of course, not to say evolve, but soon after we retired and moved away a traffic light was installed at one of the intersections, the first and only one in town. And the Ford dealership closed.

The population of Apalachicola was 2,500, a small town closely gathered by Apalachicola Bay and Apalachicola River, and bound by paper company forest on the west, so nowhere to expand. Eastpoint is five miles across the bridge, Port St. Joe twenty miles west on US 98.

If I were going to change Apalachicola in any way, I’d open a car dealership, and take down the traffic light. And reopen Chapman as a high school.

That’s about it.

Oh, I’d move Wesley back, and the Watkins. And George Chapel

T still moving through +Time