Historical Setting, 629 C.E. The Farm in the Vosges Mts.
“Happily-ever-after’s” are the leftovers and dirty dishes and a certain emptiness rarely celebrated. There is a need for the reassessment of hopes and dreams and a new look back at the unsorted and cluttered of it all, not to mention, the daunting requirement for forward looking into the strange, unknowable world of new.
With the tunes of wedding still stuck in our heads, the old familiar songs of last season seem stale and yet the new doesn’t fit the chasm old has hummed into hearts.
This peaceful night in our own little cottage near where the creek runs down, always with the music of its flowing just outside our summer windows, the owl’s song and the last twitters of the day birds, the tender softness of Ana in my arms is the warm and familiar. This welcome sameness amid all the newness is a comfortable blessing. Thank you, God.
As always and forever my hand wraps her breast, still soft and smooth as the day these breasts first nurtured our infant sons. But for a moment now, … I just thought I felt something else — a hard little pit. I can’t tell her this secret dread that completely pours over me just now, but maybe she already knows, maybe she has pain from this. She must have noticed my fingers turned cold.
“Laz, what’s the matter?”
“I just had a worry. It is nothing.”
“We can talk in the morning, Laz. Just for tonight, let us allow everything to be beautiful.”
And so it is.
This morning I ask her.
She answers with her clear and controlled physician’s voice. “I’ll ask Hannah to use her blade. I have a theory about this.”
How can Ana, who knows the heart of medicine, speak of it in terms of a blade and a theory? “So, what is your theory?” I ask.
“This is something that happens when there is an emptiness. Everything is perfect now. We have everything we need and our sons and daughters are loved, even our grandchildren thrive… “
“And yet there is an emptiness over your heart, in that same place that once nurtured our babies.”
My tears fall first. Ana has a brave face, until she looks right at me. So I hold her close now to share our weeping where words won’t go.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 