The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life by Rod Dreher Page A

a straightaway. My ankle hit the uneven concrete, and I hit the ground. I thought screw it, I’m done. She was like, ‘Jen, get up. I’m going to finish this race with you. You’ve worked too hard.’ ”
    Ruthie and Jennifer limped across the finish line together. She would not let her friend give up.
    An eerie thing happened in that race. Ruthie ran wearing Mike’s 769th Battalion T-shirt and his dog tags. Her official race number, printed on her paper bib, was 709.
    Months later Mike learned he would be sent home for an R&R break at Easter. He sat at the kitchen table in Starhill unpacking the small bag he had brought with him on the plane and took out the bib numbers he had saved from the 5Ks he ran in Iraq.
    “Ruthie said, ‘What are you doing with my number?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about,” says Mike. “She said, ‘That’s mine.’ I said no, I just took it out of my backpack. She took off running to the back of the house, and came back with hers. They were exactly alike, with the number 709.”
    She thought these kinds of things were like God winking at us, letting us know that there is a hidden order running deeply beneath the surface of the world.
    “My car died after Mike went back,” Abby says. “I had to buy a new vehicle so she let me borrow Mike’s truck while I was shopping. I was headed out to her house one day and she was headed into town. We passed each other going opposite directions. In front of me was a van from the penitentiary with the number 709 on the grille.”
    Adds Mike, “The weird thing was that my rotation in Iraq was officially called OIF—for Operation Iraqi Freedom—07-09. In her mind, that meant something. And believe it or not, I just happened to arrive back home in the US from Kuwait on July 9—another 07-09.”
    After a few days of demobilization Mike and his men made the last leg of their journey home, to the Baton Rouge airport. Dignitaries and the media awaited them on the tarmac, but more important, so did their families. A photographer from the Advocate shot the moment Ruthie and the girls embraced Mike. It would be on the front page of the next day’s newspaper.
    Because Mike was an officer the Lemings lingered at the airport for an hour, until he had seen all his men off safely home. Meanwhile Abby was frantic. They had planned a surprise party for Mike in Starhill, but Abby’s flight home from a Florida vacation had been delayed into New Orleans. She threw her luggage into her car and flew north, hoping to beat the Lemings to Starhill.
    As Abby sped past the on ramp near the airport, Mike and his family were at that moment pulling onto the interstate.
    “That’s a 709 moment right there,” Mike said. Then they looked at the truck’s digital clock.
    It read 7:09.
    As the Lemings reached Starhill, Mike beheld yellow ribbons tied to trees lining the country road on the last mile home. A sheriff’s deputy had parked his car at the top of the gravel driveway, which struck Mike as odd. Seconds later Mike saw a pair of fire trucks on either side of the driveway, firing their deck guns to create a triumphal water arch for their returning hero—Mike had been awarded the Bronze Star for “exceptional meritorious service”—to pass under in his glory.
    “The whole community was in the yard, waiting for us to get home,” Mike recalls. “They took time to come out for me and my family. It gave me an incredible feeling.”
    Mike made it home in time for a serious community crisis, but one that, by Ruthie’s lights, turned into an unexpected blessing. On September 1 Hurricane Gustav made landfall in Louisiana. New Orleans was not hard hit, but the Baton Rouge area, which had come throughKatrina without big problems, was devastated. In Starhill the power went out for days. Everyone pulled together to help each other remove fallen trees and make food, ice, and gas runs into Mississippi.
    Naturally everyone got together on those hot nights at Mam and