Vacation Bible School 5

When I was in high school, I played piano for the Methodist Church in Pine Village, Indiana. My duties carried over to Vacation Bible School. One year, my neighbor Agnes Moore, who owned the farm across the road from my father’s place (where my family had moved in 1968), was assisting as an instructor. Each morning, I picked her up and drove her to the church.

A Popsicle Stick Church Similar to the One Agnes Moore and I Made

Agnes was in her eighties, but she enjoyed complete mobility and was so active that she seemed much younger than her years. Every sunup except on the coldest days of the winter, she walked briskly down the gravel road with her black Spaniel-type dog for company. Agnes was practically jogging. In the stillness of daybreak, her footsteps on the gravel road were audible. I heard the crunching sounds and thought, “Agnes is up.”

During the Bible School, she taught the youngsters to make churches by gluing Popsicle sticks to milk cartons. She and I designed a more elaborate structure of our own. I found it great fun to work with her. After a few days, our Popsicle church was a veritable cathedral!

At about the same time, Agnes called my father and asked him to use her gun to drop raccoons that her dog had treed in her orchard. I thought, “A lot of good that will do! Dad doesn’t know anything about guns.” My mother did not permit guns in our house. I stayed home while my father walked up the road to Agnes’ farm. I heard two light reports of a gun, so I thought I might as well go to see if Dad had had any luck. I met Agnes and my father at her door. She was putting her small gun away. When I expressed my surprise that Dad had been successful, Agnes said to me, “Don’t you know that your father has always been a crack shot?”

I felt like Scout learning about Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. When my father grew up, he trained himself to be an excellent marksman. I had known nothing about his skill.

Agnes was a link to my father’s past, for she had recognized a youthful skill of his that had been kept from my knowledge. Agnes was also a link to the community’s future through the lessons she taught to the children in the Vacation Bible School. Her life became increasingly meaningful. When I learned that she and her husband, who predeceased her by many years, had built the tidy house that I often visited, I was not surprised. Agnes was one of the most capable people I ever met. Overlooking the kitchen on the ground level was a higher living room accessible by a few steps and bordered by a neatly turned railing. Until I discovered that Agnes and her husband had planned and constructed their house, I thought that it might be another of the pre-packaged houses that Sears had sold in the early 1900s. (My family lived in one.) The excellence of the craftsmanship and the high polish of the woodwork reminded me of Sears houses. On several winter mornings, my mother sent me with fresh baked goods to Agnes’ door, and, to this day, I recall the pleasant warmth of Agnes' wood-burning stove and the coziness of the home that she had created with her own two hands.