Historical setting: 602 C.E. Cottage in the Vosges
Change is the nature of things that grow and things that heal and living things we come to know. Twelve years have passed. We know how it was, and how it is and there is a big difference between the “was” and the “is” but these deep changes happened in God’s time, barely noticed by Ana and me. Yet all this growing new and healing is significant and in fact, world-changing. Poets call it the “fullness” of time, or maybe in everyday human terms it seems the absence of time.
Ana is seasoned now, having born our eight children, and seven of them have lived into their childhoods. Well, Gabe and Greg don’t think they are yet children. They believe they are fully men, even though Ana and I know them for who they are. They look at one another and are assured they are simply small-statured, barefaced men. They push themselves to be the wonders of humankind they believe they already are. If I do say so, as the father of these “men,” they are exceptionally brilliant in their studies and each has his own beautiful gifts in music and rhetoric.
Yes, we did have those two babies baptized soon after I last wrote in this journal. We took them to the “secular” church where Mater Doe gave them a proper Christian sprinkling. So we have been off to that church in the hills above Annegray for all these holy days since. At special times, as with the Mass for the Blessing of the Hunt and the Christ Mass, we take Colleen’s donkey, Jack, who lives in our stable now, towing the cart with Ana and the littlest children while the rest of us walk over the hills and into the forest for worship.
We share in the breaking of the bread with the family of hunters we met so many years ago when Colleen was with us, just before the births of the twins.
Colleen is living as a nun now, at Luxeuil, but our nearer neighbors still stop off at our cottage on their trek back from church to their woodland home. We dry shoes of all sizes on the hearth and we still share the porridge or possets according to the seasons.
The child with the wet boot we first dried at our hearth is named Charlie. Now he is an older friend, like a big brother, to our boys.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 