The Summer Between Eternities

The bed and breakfast inn was easy enough to find. At the end of a winding gravel drive a large frame farmhouse much like Laura’s stood flanked by two giant spreading oaks. Hanging ferns and rocking chairs on the front porch greeted Colin as he unfolded from the TR-6. “Luvly,” he murmured. Sometime while he was here, he would have to sit on that porch and sip a mint julep. Not that he had ever tasted one; but this would definitely be the place to try it.

Laura had already called to announce his arrival. Charlotte Ayers, the energetic hostess welcomed him and showed him to an upstairs bedroom where he was told to “make yourself at home.” So he did. It was strange how safe he felt here. That night he watched the moon rise over the rim of Catawba Mountain. A breeze drifting through the screened window carried the distant hooting of an owl and lowing of a lone cow somewhere away off. Colin stretched out on the bed and covered up, and savored the thought he would be seeing Laura almost daily now for at least a month. Sleep came easily for a change.

Sleep did not come so easily for Laura. In her bedroom upstairs in the farmhouse, she studied a framed photo on the dresser. The photo was from years past. She and Derrick were riding horses; she younger with long flowing hair, he square-jawed and handsome in the saddle. Many times, especially in late hours of night as she tended to the awful necessities of caring for an invalid, the photo would remind her of what he had been like. In Heaven, she mused, he was surely like that again.

She ended the day with prayer, as usual. “And Dear Lord, if you will, please tell Derrick we’ve found someone to fix the cottage roof for him, the way he wanted it.” She began to weep suddenly. “His … his name is Colin.”

Afterwards Laura’s thoughts drifted in and out of the seven-year ordeal following her husband’s stroke. His face had been only a mask, his eyes vacant; and each day was as if he had died anew. Laura was only now beginning to understand she had spent those years in shock. The shock had encased her soul with protective scar tissue, but it had smothered the light laughter, the happiness that had been such a part of her.

Why, she wondered, did that lightness of soul now flicker to life when she was with Colin? She pictured his boyish grin and ready humor, all the more intriguing when contrasted to the serious purpose that would come over his face at other times. The thought she would be seeing him nearly every day now surged with surprising happiness. But … he surely has no knowledge of God or salvation. And what truly was behind the sad pain, the fear and anger she had seen in his eyes? And he wants no one to know he’s here? In the night silence a vague uncertainty suddenly replaced the rising happiness in her heart.

In the nightstand beside her bed was a revolver she had kept for self-defense all the years she had lived essentially alone in the isolated farmhouse. She could get the weapon in hand much faster than she could get her hunting rifle. Back before his stroke, Derrick had taught her to use the pistol, and she had become very proficient with it. She had never needed to use it … But now she was glad it was there.

“Dear Lord,” she prayed, “am I doing right in having Colin come here? Please protect me, Lord. You know my heart isn’t … very reliable just now.”

As she prayed, a stray thought from the Evil One entered her mind as they sometimes do when we are praying. Protect you? The one who let you drown in sorrow for seven years, and let your heart be ripped out at the end? You’re asking him for protection?

Laura paused and swallowed hard. “No,” she prayed silently, “I am asking the One who created me and gave me life, who holds my very breath in His hands, who carried me in His arms for seven years. I’m asking Him.”

It was all true, of course. So why did she have this nagging fear of, before her life on earth was done, what else might God allow to happen to her?