#66.11, Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne

         “Sjókona, I can call you by a name now. And is this your home?”

         “Home?”

“Yet you said you haven’t been back here since you were abandoned as an infant.?”

         “Really, I’ve only been told of this. Some years ago Auld Bjorn brought another infant girl across the sea. She also had survived on these rocks and he gifted her to me. Auld Bjorn was the one who told me the reason for deaths of girls. It was the scarcity of good farmlands and the fear of having to feed so many new generations that only boys were needed. He told me he thought that a thrall who had to put her girl baby out would make a wish that some sailor would come and find that child yet alive, so it is that this secret house is where daughters are left to be rescued as I was.”

         “Whenever a wind persists from the West I’ve imagined coming here, but then I just never came.”

         “So, the old man, I know now is named Auld Bjorn, gifted you with a baby girl?”

         “She didn’t live. She had already suffered too long and she shivered through that night and then died.”

         “I’m sorry. I also know grief well.”

         “Oh, I don’t grieve. She had no name. If you don’t allow yourself to fall into caring, you only have to grieve when the death is of a hero, and then everyone makes a memorial of it.”

         “However you try to hide from grief, that’s what brought you here to this place, isn’t it?”

         “But Lazarus, I would think, you, claiming life and life again would never have to worry over the woes of death.”

         “It is quite the opposite.  The one thing about living into the future is the persistent pain of longing for what once was. I grieve for my once family, for my loved ones and for the farm we had. I even long for the geese and the fish in the creek. Now, I find that in this time and place, my grief is particularly deep and heavy.”

         “I kind of guessed Christianity was good at grief, with the moaning after the cross and all?”

         “Grief isn’t a Christian thing, or a Pagan thing; It is the sorrow for of all of life regardless of religion.”

         Now silence, maybe we both know grief too well for more words.

         I shift the silence with a new question. “So, the old man is this Auld Bjorn?”

         She laughs. It breaks the stress. 

         “You don’t know anything at all, do you, Heitman?”

(Continues tomorrow)