"ALL GLORY LAUD AND HONOR ...."

Sitting alone in a cushioned pew at Kennebunkport’s South Congregational Church last Sunday — Palm Sunday — I was doing fine until the organist played the opening notes of the final hymn: “All Glory Laud and Honor, to you, Redeemer, King, to whom the lips of children made sweet hosannas ring…”

Tears swelled. I couldn’t sing, even though I knew the words by heart. Suddenly I was eight years old, sitting in the very last row of our hometown Methodist church. I wore a pink cotton dress hand-sewn by my dear grandma, smushed between older twin brothers Robert and Ross, and sister Robin. We four were tightly bookended by Mom and Dad who squeezed an arm or bonked us on the head (hence, the back row, I’m sure) if we so much as thought about jiggling or poking one another.

We six were a family joined by love and buoyed with joy for each other. We were a unit: the Burkhardt family, the first people I knew in the world, and whom I’ve known and loved all my life. My permanent best friends.

Today, my parents are long deceased and my sibs and I are now in our 80s, still embracing life and adventure but struggling. Robin and Ross suffer with Parkinson’s Disease, Robert has almost recovered from a devastating stroke, while I take potent pills to forestall inevitable heart failure.

As kids, we all got strep throat, chicken pox and the mumps, always at the same time. Mom’s nursing duties must have been endless when one of us walked home from school complaining of itchy red spots. Within days, the quartet “went down like the Hindenburg” with measles.  

We didn’t just get sick together, we played and laughed together. We’d lay on our parent’s big bed listening to “Inner Sanctum” and “The Lone Ranger” on the radio. We played “kick the can” in the summer and tobogganed “the big hill” in the winter. We picked and sold raspberries along Route 32, scouted the woods for arrowheads and Revolutionary coins, played cowboys and Indians in a slap-dash shanty we dubbed  Fort Apache. I also recall racing as fast as my little legs could go through the apple orchard while Robert and Ross honed their aim at me with BB guns. Brothers!

Dad’s mother died when he was 10 months old. The care and love he never received from his step-mother somehow transformed into a deep and profound love for each of us. Throughout my life, he told me over and again, “You can come to me at any time, with any problem, any situation, and I will love you no matter what. Remember that.”

Our mother’s sharp wit kept us giggling, her no-nonsense approach to life kept us grounded (we would have to be in an iron lung to miss school), and her creative brain kept us reaching for the stars. I wonder now how she raised and fed four rambunctious kids (when I was born, my sister was 3 and the twins were 1 1/2) plus various pets on my dad’s then stingy post-war salary. She never complained, she made do. 

Singing that nostalgic hymn last Sunday, feeling my throat constrict, I wished we four kids could still leapfrog over rocks in the brook and play hide-and-seek in our own Sherwood Forest. I miss dad banging the ivory keys, playing our bedtime song on the piano as we marched around the living room, then up to bed. I miss my mom whispering in my ear, “Val, you can do anything you want — just go for it.” 

I’m so glad we sang that hymn last Sunday. I cherish those memories and treasure my sibs.