Think about it for a while. How can you hope to have any friends when you spy on everything they do? How can you enjoy the present when you can see the future? Most of all, how can you love when you know Death lies in waiting?
If you were to be stranded on a desert island, what three items would you take? I gave this frivolous answer: A cat, a hat and a piece of string.
All schools have their skeletons. St Oswald’s is no exception. Most of the time, we try our best to keep them in the closet. But this time, the only recourse we have is to throw open all the closets, light as many bulbs as we can and catch the vermin as it comes out.
If only I had patience. If only I could sleep till spring. If only I were the hawthorn tree, too old to love, too wise to hate.
It all begins so hopefully, but these Worlds we build for ourselves are all just castles in the sand, waiting for the evening tide.
No one sees clearly during a war. History gives perspective.
Never trust a ruminant.
Ho sognato di essere vecchio. E tu, tu mi eri accanto. Per sempre giovane, in mano una tazza di stelle.
What is it that the slave dreams? The slave dreams of being the master.
There she goes. How strange she is: my winter child; my changeling. Wild as an armful of birds, she flies everywhere in an instant. There is no keeping her inside, no making her sit quietly. She has never been like other girls, never like other children. Rosette is a force of nature, like the jackdaws that sit on the steeple and laugh, like a fall of unseasonal snow, like the blossom on the wind.
It’s too early for strawberries. But the clearing is filled with their leaves and their little white flowers, like fallen stars. The wishing well was covered, too, so that only someone who knew it was there would have really noticed it. It looks like a barrow under the green; somewhere fairies or goblins might live.
Sometimes, being told not to do something just makes us want it all the more. Sometimes, a little of what you crave is better than total abstinence.
Seven o’clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the End of the World, and goblins had been at the cellar again.
For a teller of tales will never die, but will live on in stories – for as long as there are folk to listen.
My mother marked the events of her life with recipes, dishes of her own invention or interpretations of old favorites. Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity.
And if I never have a veil, or a golden ring on my hand, I will still have you, my love, and that will be enough for me. Sleep well, love, and dream of me. And know that, if I were to live for a thousand years, there would still not be enough nights in which to dream of you.
At five in the morning the Loire is still and sumptuous with mist. The water is beautiful at that time of the day, cool and magically pale, the sandbanks rising like lost continents. The water smells of night, and here and there a spray of new sunlight makes mica shadows on the surface.
Come to me in love, Love. Come to me in love.
But I do like the church. I like the smell of polished wood and incense. I like the colored window glass and the statue of Saint Francis. Reynaud says Saint Francis is the patron saint of animals, who left his life to live in the woods. I’d like to do that. I’d build myself a house in a tree, and live on nuts and strawberries. Maman and I never go to church. Once, that might have caused trouble. But Reynaud says we don’t have to go. Reynaud says God sees us, and cares for us, wherever we are.
Food is the thing that unites us all, that brings us back together. Food is the thing we can provide when there is nothing else we can do. That’s why we serve it at funerals. To remind us that Life always goes on.