Historical Setting, 629 C.E. Vosges Mts.
With all of the guests gathered around watching through the windows and opened door of the little thatched house gift, everyone was anticipating Gaia’s response when she discovers this is actually a house that Brandell and his whole family have made for them. This is her house.
Gaia seems to have gone from the wonder of thatch, to the hope of one day maybe. And now Brandell sits next to her on the bed. A few drunken whoops and chants through the windows tell Gaia they are not alone in this house.
Brandell asks her, “Do you touch only with your imagination? Or do your fingers tell you what is real?”
“I do know some things, Brandell. It is only my eyes that don’t see. With my fingers I see a dream you have for us. The women we traveled with, some are here now, had this same kind of dream. When they came to their new land they would have houses filled with all the things for family and beautiful life. Now I see that your family has set up this house here in the middle of my string for greeting people, so that I, too, could nurture a dream for a real house for my new husband and maybe for a family of lots of children one day.”
Now the whoops and cheers from the door and windows are raucous.
The musicians are starting the dance and the distraction allows Brandell and Gaia a brief moment of solitude in the midst. Brandell draws the shutters closed, and from outside I close the door. I hear the bar on the inside of the door come down too. The solitude we’ve allowed inside that thatched house fills the imaginations of every guest and family at this wedding – memories of our own love bonds, lusts, and beauty, bare —
Now, the new poet sings tender and familiar words touching depths newly revealed.
My arms wrap Ana in gratitude. Thank you, God, for the mother of this family, Ana, and for all these ways of love. Ana offers her own amen, “So be it, Laz.”
Ana is quivering in the night air, as on the day we first came to our hill cottage. She was a little bird, soft in my arms — yet all of these years with its tender, lavender scented, naked nights, and pangs of birth and infant wakings, have brought us to this abundance of family, children, grandchildren and the dance.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 