I started teaching high school English when I was 21 in a place called New Hope.
It wasn't really a town. It wasn't a village. It was, in Mississippi parlance, "a community" — a rural area in Lowndes County, Mississippi, with neighbors spread far and wide. However, it had a great school and several churches that anchored the community together.
At the time, I was a recent graduate of Mississippi State University and lived 33 miles away in Starkville, Mississippi. Each morning and afternoon, I drove to New Hope, crossing the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway twice each day just outside Columbus, Mississippi.
I taught at New Hope for two years, lucky enough to have the same group of 30 students both years. We got to know each other well.
Toward the end of my second year, the school loaded up all the ninth graders and teachers, and we traveled in school buses all the way across the county to the Lowndes County Vo-Tech Center.
I ended up sitting in a bus seat with a ninth grader named Lovess Johnson, whom I had taught for two years. He knew many of my stories, and I knew his. We were to sit together for the 20-minute drive to the Vo-Tech.
As we left Columbus, we could see the big bridge across the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway ahead.
Lovess, 15 at the time, said to me, "Look at that big bridge!"
He was so excited and was trying to get a good look at the bridge through the bus window. As we got closer, he said, "Have you ever crossed that bridge, Ms. Risher?"
I told him that I crossed it twice every day — on my way to and from school. Then I looked at him and said, "Lovess, have you ever crossed this bridge?"
At that moment, the bus reached the start of the bridge. Lovess turned to me with a giant grin and said, "No ma'am, but I'm crossing it now."
That's how the last few weeks have felt to me. I have never crossed the bridge of a house fire, but I'm crossing it now.
Like the smile on Lovess' face indicated, there is power in firsts — and all these new things can be exciting, certainly transformative. Maybe I was approaching life like I had approached crossing the Tennessee-Tombigbee twice a day. I thought I had seen it all, but then life keeps surprising us with new bridges to cross.
The fire has also shifted my perspective — things I took for granted in everyday life, much like crossing the same ole bridge each morning and afternoon, feel a lot more miraculous now. In the last few weeks, I've experienced profound appreciation time and again, in a variety of moments all are linked to the generosity of friends, including moments like:
- washing my face with hot water and my own wash cloth;
- putting on a pair of new shoes sent to me by a friend;
- eating a bowl of soup a friend dropped by, with a loaf of crusty bread;
- multiple friends coming to my rescue to help hang drapes in our temporary home on a day when I didn't have it in me to do so;
- extra furniture that other friends were happy to share.
Appreciating life's little graces and moments of beauty is a lovely way to live. This week, as we have started to settle in the rental where we'll be living for a while as they rebuild our home, I met new neighbors, including a 7-year-old boy named Henry and his 6-year-old sister named Lucy, who has pink glasses "just like" mine.
As I was standing on the sidewalk admiring Henry's bike, he took off his helmet, hit the bicycle seat and said to me, "I got this baby a couple of Christmases ago."
Right about then, Lucy ran out the front door holding a piece of paper. She yelled, "I made you something. I made you something."
She ran up to me and presented me with a picture that her mom said Lucy worked on for a long time. It's of a superhero girl wearing a cape and sporting pink glasses. On the bottom of the coloring sheet, Lucy wrote in her little-girl handwriting "Hi Neighbor, from your neighbor Lucy."
New hope sometimes comes in the form of new neighbors — and places anchored by schools and churches. All these years later, our house fire has reminded me that communities are still held together by friends, family and faith, especially when it's time to cross a new bridge.
Getting to the other side of new and difficult bridges requires moving forward. Sometimes we can't be sure if we can make it all the way across until we're on the new bridge.
Which is where we find ourselves — and just like Lovess, we're crossing it now.
