My Heart Belongs in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania by Murray Pura

Author:Murray Pura [Pura, Murray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781683227427
Publisher: Barbour Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

January 1862

Gettysburg

It was as if she wanted to etch every part of her hometown into her head and heart. Wanted to exchange bad memories for new and better ones, get rid of ghosts and replace them with flesh and blood, thrust murky and upsetting experiences far away and embrace experiences that were fresh and appealing and filled with hope.

Clarissa marched—not walked or strolled, marched—from her house just off York Street, along Baltimore until she turned right on Breckenridge, waved to her friend Ginnie who was shoveling snow by her front door, carried on until she decided to double back and take South Washington Street to Gettysburg College, crossing the railroad tracks. Then she chose not to carry on to Mummasburg Road, turned around, recrossed the tracks, and headed to her right when she reached Chambersburg Street, putting the Lutheran seminary with its distinctive cupola, a larger version of the one atop Christ’s Church, squarely in her line of sight, along with Seminary Ridge, upon which the seminary had been built thirty years before. At this point, she made up her mind to stretch her legs far more than she’d planned when she set out, headed straight to the seminary, nodded to several students who tipped their caps, carried on past them, and took an icy path that wound its way down and across a flat field and then up to another prominence called Cemetery Ridge. On the way, she first crossed Fairfield Road, stepped gingerly over a frozen part of Winebrenner’s Run, clambered over a five-foot fence, crossed the Emmitsburg Road after three carriages had rattled past, climbed another five-foot fence, then tramped up the short slope to the top of the ridge.

“Oh my. Thank You, my Lord; this makes the long hike all worthwhile.”

Cemetery Ridge gave her a magnificent view of Gettysburg as she caught her breath, breath that wound about her face and dark blue winter bonnet in threads of white. Smoke from hundreds of chimneys rose straight into the gray sky like pencil lines. After a few minutes of taking the view in, she carried on into the cemetery itself, Evergreen, past its handsome brick gatehouse, which served as the caretaker’s residence, and meandered among the gravesites with their black iron fences and their white and gray monuments, pausing to read several epitaphs of persons she had known growing up.

Eventually, she made her way from the cemetery and began to walk the length of the ridge, which she knew to be about two miles. Now the town and seminary were at her back, to the north, though she could clearly see the snowy slopes of Seminary Ridge off her right shoulder to the west, despite the low clouds. It did not take her long to reach the stone wall that marched its way across the crest of the ridge. She loved the rough and ready scrambled look of the field rocks and had played on them when she was a child. Some parts of the wall had tumbled down.

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