When Sophie disembarked from the long train ride east, she found herself in the state of Vermont in a small town close to the New Hampshire border. Liza’s parents had been relatively well-off and at a particular point late in their lives, had decided to sell their home and business interests and buy a small gentleman’s farm. They began to travel widely, a fondness for which has been passed on to their children, particularly Liza, so that the resulting combination of both the inclination towards travel and the means to indulge it found Liza traveling quite extensively as a young lady. By the time she was nineteen, Liza had seen California and many of the southern states as well as France and Italy.
It was a trip to explore the prairie lands of the Dakotas that had found her stranded in the small town where she had met Aidan. She returned briefly to the East to explain things to her family. The meeting did not go well and she promptly returned and married. Now she had come full circle, stepping off of the train not the headstrong young girl of twelve years ago but possessing a quiet strength, an understanding of how despair and hope can spring from the same root. Liza’s hope now expressed in the form of the young girl standing next to her.
They were met by Liza’s younger brother Michael and taken back to the family home, now empty of
both parents who had passed on while Liza was living in the Dakota’s. Since it was June, Sophie had the summer to explore and become accustomed to her new home so that by the time she was enrolled in a private school nearby, she had , with the flexibility and acceptance so often seen in children, settled in quite nicely. It would have pleased Aidan who so often pointed out that it "don’t do much good to fight that which we can’t change" She remembered a particularly vivid lesson in acceptance one day when a storm was kicking up , being announced by the sudden gusting of winds, coming strong and even across the flat and treeless grasslands, with enough force to blow a grown man over if he tried to stand upright in the face of it. Aidan showed Sophie how to stand facing the wind and then lean forward, keeping her body loose so that the same wind that had blown her over a moment before, now held her up, without any effort at all on her part. " Sometimes, things come along in life that you can’t fight. They’ll feel like they want to just knock you over. When they do, you just lean into them a bit and let that hold you up until the storm passes."
Sophie’s childhood passed uneventfully, but fruitfully. As a result of moving to the East she received an education that would not have been available to her in the rural county where she was born. She learned Latin and some Greek and was exposed to philosophy and literature and poetry and history. Mathematics and biology and music. Sophie did well, was not a spectacular student, but seemed to be possessed of that rare ability to see the connections between many different disciplines and to understand the things she was taught in the larger context of human experience. In the summer, Sophie and her mother would travel as Liza had done as a young girl and Sophie saw the hills of Scotland and the ruins of Stonehedge. The cathedrals of France and Spain and the art of Florence and Rome and the silence of an abandoned Buddhist temple. She collected wind chimes, a reminder of her father, leaving them as a thank you to him in each of these places where she visited so that from the hills of Avalon to Avignon , the air was full of the tender chiming prayers of a little girl thinking of her father and expressing her love and thankfulness wherever the wind blew.
Sophie fell in love when she was in her late twenties and was married. The couple remained childless for many years and suddenly, as sometimes happens in life, a number of changes came to them together and all of a sudden. Sophie received news that she was pregnant and her husband received news that he had been called up to serve in the war with Germany. The year was 1941 and Sophie was to again find herself alone, trying to remember to lean into the wind.
The months of her pregnancy passed slowly as Sophie filled her days working in and around the home, tending her garden and volunteering at the local Red Cross. Letters from her husband, though having been mailed regularly, sometimes arrived two and three together from his various locations as his battalion moved about in the European theater of war. His letters were always hopeful of returning home and taking up again the routine, somewhat mundane life which he had complained about from time to time in the past. He wrote more than once that never again would he complain about the quiet circumstance of their life together. He was anxious to return home again, though Sophie could sense an increasing tone of weariness in his writing and, after so many battles a growing appreciation for the probabilities of surviving each of the many more which were still ahead.
Sophie’s baby was born prematurely and spent the next 6 weeks in an incubator. It was a period of intense anxiety for Sophia and of increasing loneliness separated now not only from her husband, but also from her baby, who’s physical nearness only served to deepen the isolation which was growing like a weed in her mind, choking her emotions. Sophie watched and waited and prayed but the days dragged on without sign of improvement. The baby’s heart had been weakened and each day that closed without change brought an increasing sense of resignation in the doctor’s hopes for improvement. What began with captive breath and the strict cadence of the second hand, slowly blurred into a single moment, with no distinctions of day and night, minute or hour. An unceasing , crawling now in which time did not expand as much as simply grind to a halt. Unchanging with her baby’s condition, it bore down with oppressive force on Sophie’s soul, sapping her strength and reducing her thoughts to something detached from words. No thoughts, no emotions, no pleasure or pain, it all was held unmoving in time as Sophia waited for her baby. And then, in the still of one early morning , as Sophia, unable to sleep, sat next to the glass enclosed crib which had been her baby’s only home, the quiet was broken by a single, prolonged tone, echoing the wail in Sophie’s heart. Sophie was ushered out of the room as nurses scurried into action, the sounds of carts and staccato instructions finally resolving into the quiet humming of the fluorescent lights overhead. Sophie’s baby died without her ever having held him.
A few weeks later she received word that her husband had been killed in a small battle outside of a village she had never heard of and couldn’t , when she later tried, locate on any map or globe.
The wind now threatened to push her flat against the ground as every impulse cried out in rage and frustration and despair. There was no comfort to be found and, especially after a night of restless sleep, as the rising mists of morning brought their reminder of her pain, she would stand up against the gale, striking at it and cursing its strength and merciless destruction of all she loved. The pain and anger began to turn inward and Sophie became withdrawn, wandering the rooms of her house and grounds aimlessly, without thought or feeling. She refused to see anyone and began the slow self destruction of the defeated soul. Her focus had pinpointed to illuminate a single spot in her experience so that every thought, every memory , every feeling had to pass though that single point of reference and in doing so became bitter and empty. She had developed a cancer of the heart which was eating away at her starting first with her hope for tomorrow, then her confidence for today and finally her thankfulness for yesterdays past.
This went on for a lifetime, for every moment holds all of tomorrow and the whole of yesterday, until Sophie stopped leaning, stopped even her defiant fighting and allowed herself to lay down, letting the wind blow through her, scooping her out, the whistle of it’s movement turning to a low moan as she became more hollow each day.
One night, as she lay in bed, her mind as empty as her emotions, she was caught by a sound she could not identify, coming in through the window , faintly there, then receding into the clatter of crickets and cicadas in the muggy summer heat. A slight rustle of the curtains brought it into the room and then out again. Sophie’s breath caught as she recognized the sound as a chime. Her mind raced to complete an audit of the house and grounds where she had systematically sought out and destroyed every wind chime which she had so carefully placed in the years before. It had been a particularly bad day during a period when she had been raging against the wind and could not bear to see or hear them. She had lost herself in a bloodletting of glass and metal and string until at last she sat under a small arbor in her garden, sweating and catching her breath, with the remains of her carnage scattered across the grounds behind her. So how could she be hearing one now? Slowly she moved to the window, straining her eyes as if to see the source of the sound, but the moon was obscured by low hanging clouds and she could see only the faint silhouette and sudden moving shadows of small night creatures. Still the sound called to her and she walked down the stairs and out onto the back porch , standing very still, every sense on alert to identify the source of the sound.
Then her anger rose against this herald of the enemy. How dare this reminder of futile hope sound it’s voice. Though the night was warm, Sophie was very cold, emotionless in her action. Like a Spartan she moved through the grounds, stepping quietly, alert and tensed with the cold anticipation of an assassin.
Suddenly the clouds shifted , uncovering a full moon which lit up the night, illuminating the old arbor that Sophie and her husband had built into a depression in the hillside. The effect was so sudden that it brought her up short, breaking her concentration. She moved toward it, standing for a long while simply looking in its direction,, running her hand across its lattice work, now entwined with flowering vines. Framed by the rugged bark of the grape vines and the strong purple of clematis she sat there, struggling with her thoughts, pushing away her memories like unwelcome intruders. She sat with her back against the arbor, facing the exposed shale out of which a small natural spring bubbled .
As Sophie sat staring at that wall of stone her attention was seized by the moonlight which bounced off of the wetness of that wall, it’s incandescence, like a holy glow, causing one of those moments in which everything which was formerly so familiar is seen as foreign and new, and the common elements of our surroundings become like icons, invested with a sudden and transcendent significance. .Like a Buddha she sat, or a mountain, rooted and still, her mind alert in that moment with the clarity of sudden awareness. Her breathe became short as her world reduced to only herself and the slow trickle of water against the rock. She was, at that moment, a living question and, as if in answer, her tears came, gently welling in eyes which stared unblinking in this moment of grace.
And then the tears changed their nature as a smile spread like the moonlight across Sophie’s face. A marauding cat stopped in mid stride and froze while a small family of deer lifted their heads and sniffed the air as the sound of Sophie’s laughter broke the silence.
