place of the heart

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the presence of God to witness and bless the joining together of this man and this woman in holy matrimony. The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ blessed this manner of life by his presence and first sign at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.

Here in Apalachicola for last evening's wedding in Trinity Church of Julia McArthur and Ben Redding, wishing them a hundred twenty years!

We arrived in Apalachicola on Thursday morning. Having now twice enjoyed a dozen delicious, large Texas oysters on the half shell, leaving this place of the heart again this morning, for home 7H PC and StAndrewsBay. Thinking in bible terms, though not to over do it, something metaphorical for me about rising at early dawn on the third day to go home. Apalachicola and I go way back, immediately post-WW2 1940s and into early 1950s and again nearly to the end of the 20th century. Seeming unique, a place like no other, with a particular personality, its own past, and its own secrets.

Seems like there was a time when to be One Of here you had to be born here, but if once so, I think that's no longer true. The personality faded and is changing. I first knew Apalachicola as a closed tight fishing village, but even that was a phase, a season in the history of a town that about two centuries ago was one of the major shipping ports on the Gulf of Mexico, stern wheelers bringing cotton down the Apalachicola River to be offloaded into local cotton warehouses, then loaded as cargo in sailing ships for long voyages elsewhere.

My experience was that one probably can become One With if one stays long enough. Fourteen years was not long enough, either for my heart or to become One; though by the end I felt I had, until I realized it wasn't so in the eyes of "natives", I was but a temp! If I look back, and changing little, I'd do it all again from first to latest, right up to this early Saturday morning.

Looking east, as they did in Narnia, there's peace here this morning, as peaceful as this life gets.

T