"It was obvious the indentations on the bullet were teeth marks," maybe human, maybe animal, the implication the same, agony of someone's warrior son, whether he was for or against the cause, fighting for his life.

     Mike has always had an interest in all things anthropology. He's dug up an Indian paint pot, convinced the whole family to spelunk, explore old caves, and has recently taken up metal detecting again. Turns out there was a Union Army camp just on the ridge behind us.  Our county was a hotbed of Union sympathizers in an otherwise Confederate state. Mike has read the details from the Library of Congress of the troops' movements through our area and shared them with anybody and everybody who will listen.
     Our sons and sons-in-law are Mike's detecting companions now, so much so that one son-in-law has moved his weekends around to spend them here, which also brings our daughter and their twin toddler girls into our company.  This last trip gave McKala and me time to really talk for the first time in a really long time.

     Sons, sons-in-law, fathers, brothers, husbands, I can't conceptualize what it was like having all the men in one's family leave for war, the women and children left unprotected and the soldiers often destitute of basic needs and wounded by the distinct kinds of bullets we're finding.  These days, our most common concerns as Christian mothers of young men is whether or not they're "doing right," not whether or not they might die today, tomorrow, or next month.  There must have been prostrate praying that we as this "postmodern" nation take for granted and sit back on its "lees" as written in Zephaniah 1:12, "And it shall come to pass at that time, that I will search Jerusalem with candles, and punish the men that are settled on their lees:  that say in their heart, The LORD will not do good, neither will he do evil."
      On this Memorial Day, with all its swimming and eating, I hope some of our family looked back on that hill and thought of the bewildered, homesick men whose sometimes only recreation was to carve a bullet into a chess piece or an animal head, while waiting for the the next encounter with death.

     Recently, Mike has been searching out plantation properties and other camp ridges from maps he's found, asking for permission to detect, sharing history, and getting to know the neighbors, something that he's never really had, neighbors, not for himself anyway.  He was always on the road or recovering from the road when he was home.
     The other morning, he stepped out of the house and heard a planer.  Since he's needing one to make a wooden truck bed, he jumped in the car to see which neighbor it was.  That neighbor invited him back, so Sunday he and I went together to search the premises for metal.  After some work on a  tractor, a couple of hours detecting, and a good practical joke in the breezes under a great big walnut tree, we wound up having tea with him and his wife on their porch, circa 1893, and having a little tour of their house and studios.  He's a musician, and she's an artist.  And Madalynn, our musician and artist, can't wait to go visit them.  Seems like this metal detecting is taking us places, including back into the realm of writing, as he is the one who challenged me to write again, based on the introductory sentence he assigned.
     So, here I am on a Tuesday morning doing what I love, after sleeping as long as we could stand the 57 degree chill in the hammocks we hung in our own "campsite" by the fire pit Mike had the kids create yesterday, still none of us having a particular inkling of the trepidation the men must have had, camping behind us March 29 through April 1, 1865 in the cold and the wet of the nor'easter with no way of knowing the Civil War would end in only 14 days.