It was snowing when my teenage son and I left Akron, Ohio for our Christmas break trek to Father Beiting Appalachian Mission Center in Louisa, Kentucky. The drive is about 4.5 hours and this was my seventh trip here. We come here as volunteers nearly every time my son has a break from high school. He frankly doesn't care for this type of "vacation" and I probably would not have liked it either as a teen. But he manages to take it in stride because I keep threatening to move here for good, so a week here and there is a better deal from his perspective.
The drive was pretty with snow on the ground. It gives perspective to the scenery and makes all the farmhouses look like Christmas cards. It had snowed here too, and the snow takes hostages in the hills. If you are at the bottom of the mountain you are not going up, and if you are on top you might have to stay there a day or two.
Our favorite place to stay at the Mission Center is called Padre's Place. This is Father Beiting's eclectic little retreat at the top of a hill with a cemetery and a life size statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus under the trees in the center of the circular driveway. There are several cozy trailers at Padre's Place - one with a woodburning fireplace. However, Mother Nature (or gravity) determined that no one would make it that far up the mountain the night we arrived.
Always creative and flexible, Sister Kateri would come up with something, I knew. There is a lovely new duplex house at Point of Hope. During the current restructuring of the transitional housing program, the POH campus was nearly vacant. The duplex was available, sans stove or fridge. No problem, I didn't come here to cook! (Although some people do.)
My son and I unloaded the sleeping bags, duffles, and cooler into the duplex living room. The thermostat was set at 50 so I turned it up before we headed over to the Chinese buffet in the defunct Foodland Plaza. After dinner with Father Beiting and Sisters Bernadette, Kateri and Pat, we headed over to the rectory to visit with Father for a while. Three volunteers from Boston - two of whom I had met here before - joined us as Father planned work for the next day.
Ready for bed early, my son and I returned to the duplex where that living room couch was calling my name and the mattress on the floor upstairs was calling his. It seemed a little chilly,
I thought, though admittedly we are not used to a toasty, energy efficient environment in our Ohio century farmhouse! We had been gone for two hours and the thermostat read 57 now. The furnace was runnning constantly, but 57 was a bit cool even for our pioneering natures.
Ever solicitous, Sister Kateri created an ersatz flashlight to inspect the furnace by removing the shade from a small lamp and pointing the bare bulb into the closet. We all felt the furnace flue and agreed it was not hot enough! We inspected circuit breakers, hot air registers, and the water heater. This fixed nothing but it kept us busy. It also gave me the idea to test the hot water, which sputtered and coughed and spat out a continuous icy spray without a trace of warmth.
Sister offered us beds at the POH Center, which she and Sister Bernadette had prepared ahead of time. I almost took her up on it, but then I remembered the St. Joseph guest house by the river, near the rectory. Also known as "the blue house" (guess why?), St. Joe's recently was renovated to keep it from falling into the Big Sandy River (good idea...) Maybe we could try that?
We drove our gear over to the house. We had stayed there last Christmas. "Don't take the stuff out of the car yet," I said. "Let's see how it is." The light switch inside the kitchen door turned on two ceiling fans but not the lights. Taking baby steps in the dark with my hands held out straight in front of me in case I crashed into anything, I shuffled across the living room to the opposite side of the room and groped for the switch on a big table lamp. Click.click.click. No light! I felt under the lampshade in the dark. No light bulb! Now I was wildly waving my arms in the air trying to find a pull chain on a ceiling fan. "Ah ha!" I exclaimed as three spiral fluorescent bulbs came to life.
"I don't think it's much warmer in here," I said, noting one large blackened and smoldering log in the open woodstove. Behind the stove, a portable fan was running in an apparent attempt to move the heat into the room. Instead, it was moving the smell of the smoking firelog very efficiently. A new electric space heater was running on "high"in the bathroom. A second, rickety electric heater was also giving it all it had, while making a very unhappy noise. Its cord was stretched to an outlet above the sink, and the plug was half out of the wall. When I tried to correct it, I noticed the plug was extremely hot. I decided to turn off the heater. Wouldn't you know, the switch was missing the cap to turn it, and me without my visegrips!! Well, I can always just unplug it, right? Imagine the look on my face - and forget what I actually said - when just one of the prongs came out of the wall and the other remained resolutely stuck in the outlet! The heater did quit, but neither of us thought we should tempt electrocution. Note to self: Tell someone about this tomorrow. By now they are all in bed!
So back outside into the 20-degree wind we wandered, and drove back to POH where the room was warm, the water was hot, and the lamps even have bulbs! I was terribly aware that Mary and Joseph would have found either the duplex or the blue house to be luxurious beyond measure. Thank you, Newborn King, for coming to us in a cold, dark stable one night. Thank you, Sister Kateri, and sweet dreams! See you in the morning!
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