The Guns of Gettysburg

Yesterday I heard the guns of Gettysburg, cannons rumbling deep and low across the hills and valleys. The sound started slowly, and for the first moments I thought it was distant thunder. But then the sounds quickened, and I knew.

One hundred forty-five years ago, those cannons fired in earnest, at brothers and sons and friends across opposite lines. The sound was louder then, loud enough at some point to wake a babe that slept only a few feet away from where I sat now. Like the people who lived then, the sound was first thought to be thunder, and like me now, they soon realized that it wasn’t. Still, for a few moments last evening, I understood, a bit, what it was like to have lived here then, when those guns of Gettysburg first fired at brothers and sons and friends across a grassy field. Last evening I sat some 20 miles away from the battlefield, and the sound of cannons fired across the fields in a reenactment of those three days still reached me and took me back 145 years.

Freedom isn’t free, nor does it come cheap. Its cost is very dear, in every sense of that word. Its value is still worth every drop it costs.