Nov/Dec 2009
By Tina Thurmond

The man stood at his upstairs window with tears coursing down his face, watching his wife of 52 years, in the yard below, doing his job. As he cried, he thought about how he loved her; how he absolutely, truly loved her. He always had. And he wasn’t used to leaning on her, not this way.

It was summer 2008, and although Webb Thornhill was now free of the malignant brain cancer that had recently threatened to take his life, treatments and brain surgery had weakened his body and left him in terrible pain. There was nothing he could do for her now, except watch from his window. And cry.

As the day wore on and he had rested some, he returned to the window again. His thoughts were on the more than 19,000 tiny Christmas trees waiting to be transplanted into buckets, and his sweet wife, his Joy Thornhill, laboring alone outside in the blistering July heat. The grief and worry threatened to overwhelm him again.

But as he reached the window, he began to cry for another reason entirely. For in the yard below, standing shoulder to shoulder with Joy, were several women from their small community of Rosalie, potting trees as fast as they could.

At first, he could hardly believe his eyes. He and his wife had not called anyone, nor asked anyone for help. So where had they come from, and who had sent them?

Suddenly, he knew who. With tears flowing freely, and his heart bursting, the man put his hand against the window and thanked God for His goodness one more time.

There was a miracle in the making at the Thornhill Christmas Tree Farm.

A GIRL WITH SPUNK

Throughout that day, and into the next, neighbors came and went. Husbands, returning from their jobs, joined their wives at the farm, and the yard was filled with activity. Christmas trees moved across tables and pallets like magic, and before anyone realized it, they were finished.

While all the activity taking place in the tree yard, Webb lay in his bed upstairs and focused on getting better. He wanted to work in his tree yard again. But most of all, he wanted to spend another 52 years with the woman who was his joy in more ways than one.

Webb and Joy Thornhill met in the first grade, more than 65 years ago. It all started with an incident Joy doesn’t recall, but Webb says it was the moment he fell for her.

“She was just sitting there in front of me,” says Webb, “and I pulled her pigtails. Well, she turned around and gave me a look, you know, and I said to myself, ‘Hmmm, now, here’s one with some spunk!’” He was instantly smitten.

Neither of them can remember a time when they did not care for each other in some way. They were best friends growing up, and seemed to be destined to fall in love. While their childhoods were very different, to this day they are certain that is one of the reasons they’ve had such a terrific life together.

When Joy was 10 years old, she gave her life to God. Five years later, when she heard the Bible scripture that instructs Christians to “Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers” (2 Cor. 6:14), it really bothered her. Joy knew that scripture meant she could not love a man who did not share her faith.

She could not love Webb.

“I prayed to the Lord,” she says, “and I said ‘Lord, if we are meant to be together, let him get saved. But if we’re not, please let us part without anybody getting hurt.’”

Within a few short weeks, young Webb, who never knew about her prayer, went to the altar in Joy’s church and gave his life to God. Joy knew she had her answer.

While Joy had grown up in a loving family in a happy home, Webb had not grown up easily. Both of his parents died within a few years of each other when he was very young. At fourteen, he found himself on his own, and remembers he always yearned for a home and family.

So he proposed to the girl he had loved since first grade. When they were married on March 21, 1956, Joy was a high school Senior, and Webb, who had fallen a year behind, was a Junior.

He took a job to support them, and after graduation, Joy started college. Her parents paid for her first year, and her husband, though still a teenager, moved with her to Tennessee and worked to pay for the rest. They moved home to Sand Mountain after she graduated.

Joy taught school, and Webb became a certified welder and machinist. Eventually two daughters, Merry and Cherie, were born to them. Their home life was peaceful and happy.

Several years passed, and Webb began looking for a new venture that would allow him to be home more with their girls. He tried his hand at farming row crops, but was not happy with that. Eventually, he found what he was meant to do.

A TREE FARM?

“Everybody around here laughed when I said I wanted to plant and sell Christmas trees on Sand Mountain,” Webb says. Although their good-natured laughter did not stop him, it definitely influenced him a little.

“He planted the first ones way down near the woods,” Joy says, “so they couldn’t see them and laugh at him again… “but they did anyway.”

It took several years for the first crop to be ready, but in the mid-1980’s Thornhill Christmas Tree Farm opened for business.

Soon, the farm overflowed with adults and children. One evening after taking a large group of kids to tour the farm on foot, the exhausted couple decided there had to be a better way. Webb thought of a hay wagon, but Joy called to him over her shoulder as she was walking back to the house, “A train would be good.”

So, of course, he went and built one.

It was a beautiful, brightly colored, sixty-foot Christmas train, complete with passenger cars and a caboose named “Miss Joy.” To this day, it is still the pride of the farm, giving free rides to kids and adults each December.

HARD TIMES COME

Like any other family, the Thornhills have seen some tough times. Joy says they just hold on to the Lord and face life’s storms together.

Mostly, those storms have been figurative, but on February 6, 2008, a very real storm came that would test the faith of their entire community.

In the pre-dawn hours while most slept, a deadly F-4 tornado slammed into Rosalie and neighboring Pisgah. It stayed on the ground for an estimated 10.9 miles, taking one life and dozens of homes with it.

Webb and Joy were among the few whose property was miraculously untouched, so they were the first to open the doors of the Rosalie Community Center that morning. Along with other volunteers, they served hot coffee and food to those in need of help.

According to Joy, even in the midst of the devastation and destruction, God’s hand was always visible. Each time their food supply ran out, it was replenished. Each time they needed help, it came.

The center stayed open for the next four months, proving to be an invaluable resource for the little town whose spirit could not be broken.

Although they were way behind at the farm by this time, the Thornhills decided to take a short vacation. They rented a house for a week at the beach, and happily set off for some much needed rest.

It was June, 2008, and, unbeknownst to them, another storm was about to touch down.

Their vacation was not to be.

While unloading their things from the car, Webb stumbled in the doorway of the beach house, and complained of a terrible headache. He slept until the next morning, but his headache persisted. When Joy took him to a local emergency room on the advice of their doctor, she received some devastating news.

A CT scan of Webb’s brain showed a large malignant tumor. Her beloved husband had brain cancer.

The Thornhills returned home immediately, and Webb began treatment the next day at Huntsville Hospital.

“Through all of that,” says Joy, “he never complained. He just said his life was in God’s hands and there was nothing he could do by worrying, so he was just trusting in the Lord.”

By July, Webb was back at home, recuperating from a brain surgery that left him with over 200 stitches in his head.

Which is how he ended up at his window that summer day in 2008 — crying his heart out for his wife one minute, and the next, watching the neighbors he had helped through their storm help him through his.

A year and a half has passed, and Webb is back to trimming his beloved trees and preparing for another Christmas with his Joy.

Although he recently found out a small spot of cancer has returned, his doctors are optimistic that, with treatment, he should be around for a long time.

Webb and Joy Thornhill are counting on it. After all, it’s their love story, and they haven’t finished writing it yet.