A Walk To Remember💖👫

Chapter 1

In 1958, Beaufort, North Carolina, which is located on the coast near Morehead City, was a place like many other small southern towns. It was the kind of place where the humidity rose so high in the summer that walking out to get the mail made a person feel as if he needed a shower, and kids walked around barefoot from April through October beneath oak trees draped in Spanish moss. People waved from their cars whenever they saw someone on the street whether they knew him or not, and the air smelled of pine, salt, and sea, a scent unique to the Carolinas. For many time of the people there, fishing in the Pamlico Sound or crabbing in the Neuse River was a way of life, and boats were moored wherever you saw the Intracoastal Waterway. Only three channels came in on the television, through television was never important to those of us who grew up there. Instead our lives were centered around the churches, of which there are eighteen within the town limits alone. They went by names like the Fellowship Hall Christian Church, the Church of the Forgiven People, the Church of Sunday Atonement, and then, of course, there were the Baptist churches. When I was growing up, it was far and away the most popular denomination around, and there were Baptist churches on practically every corner of town, through each considered itself superior to the others. There were
Baptist churches of every type--Freewill Baptists, Southern Baptists, Congregational Baptists, Missionary Baptists, Independent Baptists... Well, you get the picture. Back then, the big event of the year was sponsered by the Baptists church downtown--Southern, if you really want to know--in conjunction with the local high school. Every year they put on their Christmas pageant at the Beaufort Playhouse, which was actually a play that had been written by Hegbert Sullivan, a minister who'd been with the church since Moses parted the Red Sea. Okay, maybe he wasn't that old, but he was old enough that you could almost see through the guy's skin. It was sort of clammy all the time, and translucent--kids would swear they actually saw the blood flowing through his veins--and his hair was a white as those bunnies you see in the pet stores around Easter.

-To be continued...
•Half of part 1 will be the next book with, Half Part 2.