An Old Familiar Place

Healing Holly Springs is a beautiful little town South of Memphis where Grant winter quartered in November and December of 1862. He brought his lovely wife, Julia, and his son those weeks he spent in North Mississippi, though they did not stay in the same house. Grant had work to do, but he missed them and took some risks with their safety to have them near him, in fact just a few houses down from him on Salem Street . His love of family brought out the human side of a man who, from a military perspective, was ruthless and heartless. JOAB features the Union General that was most hated by the South, probably as much as the North hated our Robert E. Lee. But that was the hard cold facts of War. Those who gave the orders to kill and destroy were the recipients of the height of hatred, and that was true for both sides. One thing was certain, Grant always picked the loveliest of the South's antebellum homes as his headquarters. In Holly Springs, Oxford, Vicksburg, Natchez—it was o...

I sat on the wicker swing, thinking about the ties that bind. About my mother, and peeling peaches with her on the back porch, dreaming about the day when I would leave this place and begin a life of my own, with not the least thought that this wonderful man would walk right into my life, leaving me drained of myself, filling me with his own dreams beyond my wildest imagination. Only God in heaven knows the extent of those dreams and visions that played to the hilt on the stage of my life, enhanced through the years by His amazing love and grace and brought to closing moments with continued joy unspeakable and full of glory. I was exhausted. Filled to the brim with memories. Of things I will never forget, duly reminded by this old plantation. I had to leave. I turned around to watch the wicker swing moving back and forth like a scene from an old movie in slow motion, looking up to the attic windows of the old plantation house. I slowly took the steps down, touched the hawthorn t...