The stuff of ordinary days

Homebound, I spend a lot of time thinking about the stuff of ordinary days.

A creature of habit, I am lured to the sea.

Every Saturday morning I shed my work-a-day skin and plunk myself in the sand.

No matter the season, I walk along the seashore in cadence with the waves, which are as familiar as my own heartbeat.

When the cobwebs in my mind have washed away, I head to the town library, where I wander.

Laden with a cloth bag stuffed with books, I leave a half-hour later.

Thus ends my Saturday sojourn, which I had faithfully observed until three weeks ago.

Today I retrace the footsteps in my mind to a few paragraphs I had stumbled upon, in a random book I picked up one Saturday.

Intrigued by the beautiful photographs in a new book "Little Compton -- A Changing Landscape" by the Little Compton Historical Society, I tucked the heavy volume into the bag. Our summer place in Tiverton is but a stone's throw away from this neighboring town.

Turning the pages, I spotted a photograph of Walker's Roadside Stand, a place I have frequented since childhood.

I read: "Coll Walker grew up on a dairy farm in Swansea."

How interesting, I mused. I grew up in Swansea as well.

I read on: "In 1963 when he was ready for college, his parents, Ian Walker, a native of Scotland, and Frances Peckham Walker, decided to buy ten acres of Obbie (Osborn) Sherer's Red Top Farm on West Main Road. It was a way for Frances to move back to her hometown and would help pay for Coll's education. In years' past Obbie ran a roadside vegetable stand on the property that occasionally sold bear meat. The Walkers configured the vacant buildings and opened their own vegetable stand in 1964."

Then my eyes alighted on the sentence: "Ian, a high school principal, grew the  produce ...

Suddenly, I was 12 years old again, sitting in the public middle-school auditorium of Elizabeth Stevens Brown School in Swansea. At the start of our assemblies, Mr. Walker, a short, elderly gentleman who spoke with a Scottish burr, walked to the lectern on the stage, led us in the Pledge of Allegiance and then spoke the words that I can still hear in my mind's eye:

"The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want / He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters ...

After all these years and in an instant, I began to acknowledge the profound effect this man and this prayer, the 23rd Psalm, have had on my life. Mr. Walker planted the seeds that would grow into my vocation, just as surely as he grew the vegetables that graced our table at the summer house.

With tears in my eyes, I read on: "After college and some time in the Peace Corps as an agricultural agent, Coll returned to Little Compton in 1970 when his dad became ill. Ian Walker had always run the farm as a hobby. Coll saw it in a new light. He thought there might be a future in a roadside stand business. Walker's Roadside Stand sits near the site of Little Compton's first English farm built by Benjamin Church in 1675. Coll's son Ian, named after his grandfather, is the newest farmer to work these fields."

Homebound, I spend a lot of time thinking about the stuff of miraculous days.