The Blessing of a Ginkgo Tree

“My aunt is dying,” the woman said. “Could you please bring her communion? I’ve been trying for weeks to find an Episcopal priest who will come.” Ordinarily I am glad to bring communion to folks. In this case, neither the aunt nor the niece is a member of Christ Church, and the aunt lives in a nursing home in Indian Trail. It was late Thursday afternoon. I grumbled to myself, but I got a communion kit and headed out Idlewild Road. If you stay on Idlewild long enough, you pass a Buddhist Temple and a llama ranch. On my way to the nursing home, I drove through the little town of Hemby Bridge and passed Fred Kirby Park (I think you have to be at least 50 and have grown up in North Carolina to know who Fred Kirby is).

It took me forty minutes to get to the nursing home in Lake Side, which turned out to be one of the nicest nursing homes I have ever been in. Mrs. P. was in the last room down a long hallway, lying on her side in the bed by the window. Her eyes opened when I said her name. I pulled a chair up close to the bed, told her who I was and that I had brought communion. As we talked, I was enchanted by her and by her story. She was the oldest of 14 children growing up in Massachusetts. She went to school to become a mechanic, joined the Navy and was stationed in Brunswick, Maine during World War II repairing airplanes. “But my whole life, I never rode in a plane,” she said. She met her husband, a Marine, during the war; they married months after meeting, before he went back to the Pacific. “I was married 61 and a half years,” she said, and the way she added that half-year made it sound like she counted every day with him as precious. “I’m old and tired and ready to die,” she said. “Are you afraid at all?” I asked. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. The next life is going to be far more wonderful than this one.”

After a while I began to set up communion. “When was the last time you had communion?” I asked. “Yesterday,” she replied. I froze. “Yesterday? But your niece said...” Turns out someone at the nursing home arranged for communion to be brought to her, and her niece didn’t know it.

I could just see God chuckling. I drove out to Indian Trail not because I had something to offer Mrs. P. but because she had something to give me.