The Glory on Highway 69

THE GLORY ON HIGHWAY 69

~ Ruby Swindle, Guideposts

“On the night of December 1 we’ll turn on the Christmas lights, the ones that take us three months to put up each year. I hope our married daughter will be able to make it over from Talladega, Alabama, for the lighting. After all, she’s the reason for the lights.

Her name is Ruby, same as mine, but when she cam along, a girl after three boys, everybody called her “Sis,” and the name stuck. Sis was five when she started saying how she wished other people could enjoy our lights. We had just one string then, on the tree in the living room.

“They’re so beautiful, Mother! I want everyone to see them!”

That was Sis, always wanting good things for others. Well, the next year we bought a second string and hung them on the bush by the front door, where they glowed warm and cheerful for folks driving by on Highway 69. Sis was beside herself with excitement. “I wish we could put dozens of lights out there!”

Lights cost money, of course, and we’ve never had a lot of that. Harold’s a cook at a roadside restaurant and I’m a seamstress at Oneita Mills, Sis enjoyed the lights so much that each year we managed to buy a few more. We strung them along the porch and wound them around the fence posts. One year Harold figured out a way to get lights high up in the old oak tree: He tied a length of string to a metal nut and fired it into the tree from a slingshot. When the nut dropped down over a branch, he attached a string of lights to it and hauled it up. Another year he made a frame to hold a star for the roof; we saved up and bought a lighted Nativity scene for the year so people wouldn’t miss the reason for the celebration.

After a while folks started driving by just to see our light display. “Mother!” Sis would call as a car’s tires crunched on the driveway. “Here comes another one!”

As years went by, it took more and more time to get those thousands of light up. Electric bills were bigger, too, to keep the lights burning every night for a month. But we managed fine. So many people started coming that Harold cleared a place for parking behind the house and looped the driveway back out to the road so traffic could move in a circle. Still, some nights the line of cars stretches clear down 69 and fold wait half an hour to get close.

Sis got married after high school and moved to Tallageda, ninety miles away. That was twenty years ago, but these are still “Sis’s lights,” and while we’re putting them out in the fall she comes over whenever she can to help us connect the strings and check for burned-out bulbs.

It takes every night after work and all day weekends to get hundreds of strings up on the roof and around the chicken house and up in the trees by the first day of December, when Harold throws the switch. Then a month later we start taking them down, wrapping each string separately in a plastic storage bag, storing them in the attic with the Baby Jesus and the sheep and the angels. It’s almost the end of February — that’s near six months — before we’re done.

Five years ago I had a heart attack, and now I don’t do much climbing and hammering. Nothing slows Harold, though, and there’s lots I can do sitting down: check the wiring, replace bulbs. You can’t find the old-timey ones anymore, Sis’s favorites, shaped like flowers or Christmas figures. “But I love them all, Mother!” she’ll say, fingering the strands of bulbs – the sharp-pointed miniatures, the big flame-shaped ones that can burn your fingers.

You see, Sis’s fingers tell her when a bulb’s burned out: It’s cold. Sis can’t actually see the lights, never could. She was born blind. That’s whey every light we hand is for her. For the little girl who squealed with happiness as I guided her hands along that first string, telling her, “This bulb is red … this one is yellow …” For the girl who said, “Oh, Mother, they’re so beautiful! I want everyone to see them, too!””

This story was sent to me in an email from a dear friend who has an annual tradition of sharing inspiring reading material to spark the Christmas spirit. The  above piece is an example. I hope to bring to you the ones that most touch my heart this holiday season sheerly for your enjoyment. No comments needed, really!

Jesus is the reason for the season!