November 30, 2017 – The distant sound of bagpipes

       The Macy’s Thanksgiving parade wouldn’t be complete without bagpipes – now would it?  And, earlier this year we had the Presidential Inaugural parade which included bagpipes.  I love the sound of bagpipes.  No, I am not Scottish, but in my everyday life, I rarely hear them unless I am watching a parade on TV or at some cultural event high in the mountains.

       On Thanksgiving Day as my husband was TV channel surfing, looking for the football game, I heard just a soundbite of bagpipes and it reminded of when we lived in the big house.

       We lived on West 6^th Street in Rutherfordton at the time and were renting this huge two-story clapboard house built in the 1940s. We were about six houses from the Rutherfordton Presbyterian Church on N. Washington Street.

       I had the windows wide open on a fine May Saturday morning as I am cleaning house.  I hear the skirl of bagpipes – for a moment and then it stops.   Well, that is interesting – I walk out onto the front step and see another neighbor walking up the street.

       “Did you hear that?” I asked casually. 

I only knew this neighbor lived at the end of the street but not her first name; I knew that her husband was a physical education instructor at the local college.

“At the church . . . there is a wedding . . .  there is a bagpiper.  Hurry.”  She called as she walking briskly up the street.

I left my house immediately without shutting the door or locking it and quickly caught up with her.

We were about 3 houses away when we heard the bagpipes start again.   By then, she started into a run and I followed her in a jog as I had the wrong footwear.   The sound was incredible even at that distance.

We reached the corner and the church came into view as the bagpipes continued. From what I understand from the other onlookers outside the church – which consisted mostly of curious neighbors – not the invitees to the wedding, the bagpiper was slowly walking down the center aisle of the church prior to the bride going down.   I heard it all, but I only saw the bagpiper still piping come out of the back of the church and walk off into the distance until I couldn’t see him and then the melody stopped.

It was a thrilling moment and I wasn’t even in the church.  It is not a big church and I imagined the sound must have been stunning for the wedding guests.

Now, I rarely pass that church without thinking back to that beautiful May day when the distant bagpipes made me dash down the street for a small-town-look-see.