HILLSPEAKING
from The Anglican Digest
TRANSFIGURATION A.D. 2006

Allow me a bit of personal history: By the time I was 18 I had lived in Maryland, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, and the District of Columbia, where I was born.  Twenty days after my 18th birthday I enlisted in the Marine Corps and in the ensuing twenty-one years lived and served in South Carolina, the District, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Hawaii, Korea, New York, and California.  After I retired from the Corps I lived and worked in San Antonio, Dallas, Houston and El Paso in Texas; and in Santee, Anaheim, Long Beach, La Habra, and Riverside in California; and, finally, Arkansas.
 
I am sure my experience is not atypical for a great many Americans of my generation and after.  The point is that I never really put down roots, never really had a hometown -- until Patient Wife and I moved to Hillspeak.  Today -- thirty-odd years later -- Hillspeak is home.  One thing it lacked, as a hometown, was the felt presence of forebears.  I remember writing a “Hillspeaking” sometime back in the ‘80s about St Mark’s Cemetery here at Hillspeak where I could visit colleagues and contemporaries who had gone on before, and I compared it with a country churchyard in Virginia where a senior warden had showed us the graves of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather and the plot that was his own.
 
Although Hillspeak in every sense is home, it lacked that backward tie.  When Tom Walker, himself a native of Eureka Springs and thus very much “at home” here, conceived the idea of the Hillspeak Memorial, incised bricks bearing the names of loved ones, colleagues, honorees and the like, that lack was corrected.
 
Now I have tangible, visible records of my great-grandfather Samuel, my grandfather Simeon, and my father Richard and my mother Evelyn.  And of Patient Wife’s forebears, including her American Revolution ancestor, a sergeant in the Virginia Militia, and his successors.  Also there are visible and tangible records of our marriage and of our five children.  The “hometown” sense is complete.
 
Others have done much the same with the Hillspeak Memorial so there are records of Proetzes, Parkes, Dutills, Kennedys, Pearsons, Holts, Glebers, Henrys, Parkers, Watsons, Burtons and a host of others.
 
If you would like to join them and me in memorializing or honoring forebears or contemporaries, there are particulars about the Hillspeak Memorial, and on the wrapper, an order form.
 
The cost is modest, the purpose is worthwhile, and the benefit is great.



©SPEAK, INC
805 CR 102 - EUREKA SPRINGS AR 72632-9705
PHONE: 479-253-9701    FAX: 479-253-1277       E-MAIL: speak@speakinc.org


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