Driving toward Montgomery, Alabama late one night, two businessmen planned to spend the night in a small town on the way. They were making good time through some low country where the road was a few feet above the surrounding land when they spotted a figure far ahead. As they drew nearer they discovered that it was a little old lady walking briskly along the side of the road. In the beam of the headlights, they saw that she wore a pale lavender dress, freshly pressed and sparkling clean. Her hair was neatly done, and as they slowed down to speak to her she turned a smiling face to them. She seemed completely untroubled about walking down a lonely highway in the middle of the night, in an area where snakes and other creatures would make an average woman hesitate to step from a car.
When the men stopped and asked her what she was doing on the road at that time of night, she laughingly explained that she had started out to visit her daughter and grandchildren in Montgomery. She had hoped, she said, to get a ride for at least part of the way, but no one had offered her a lift, so she had just kept on walking.
The two men said they would give her a lift as far as the next town, a two-hour drive, and she was delighted to accept. She sat in the back seat, as they drove through the night, they talked about her daughter and three grandchildren - their names, where they lived, the children's school - the usual small talk among strangers. When the subject was exhausted, the men eventually became engrossed in business conversation and forgot about their passenger behind them.
When they reached their destination, they stopped to let the elderly lady out. She was gone. Panic-stricken to think that she might have fallen out along the way, they headed back in search of her. But they found no signs of their passenger, even though they retraced their route to where they had picked her up, and saw her tiny footprints in the shoulder of the road where she had first talked to them.
Dismayed and mystified, they drove on to Montgomery to tell her daughter about the accident. After listening to their story in bewilderment, the younger woman pointed to three photos on the mantel. Could they identify their passenger? They did, and she agreed that it was her mother. Without a doubt, they had talked to her. Then they went on to describe her dress, and the woman burst into tears as she said that was the dress her mother had worn when she had last seen her.
"When was that?" they asked her, and she replied between sobs, "When she was buried, just three years ago today!"
