The Forgotten House

Wake-up feel: 6.

A restless night. In the dark I listened to someone close. Eight hundred kilometres away.

Up later than usual. Tired. The muscles aching from yesterday's work on the path. One stone at a time.

Exercises. Screen time, coffee in hand.

Out as the day grew light.

Up the mountain path, to the lone house again.

My thoughts stayed with the night — with the conversation that had brought me to being and nothingness.

No one left there to ask. The old ones tell how a house was raised here.

They began it on a Thursday, at the full moon — never under the empty moon, as they called the waning. Two nights past the full, the moon is emptying.

On the Holy Evening, the old ones here say, the dead come home to supper. A spoonful of every dish goes into a bowl on the windowsill for them, and the bowls stay unwashed through the night.

The Chumaks' Way — the road, the old people of this country said, that leads the souls of the dead to heaven — lies washed out these nights under the moon.

Tonight, for the first time since the full, the sun goes down before the moon comes up.

The window frame still standing.

Day 100
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Journey | CC BY-SA 4.0
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