Over the Bridge

Wake-up feel: 6.

A headache. Happy, and grateful.

No early walk. Not for many days now. Exercises, coffee, screen time.

When our guest woke, I made her coffee. We made breakfast together for everyone.

Then down the hill with her. The beech on the slopes gone to copper, the spruce dark among it, the birches yellow.

To the bridge. Above it, the path, and something near between the people and the land. Below it, the road. Over the bridge to the bus stop. She went home.

On the way up, the day she came, after we crossed the bridge — the threshold — she asked me: what made you come to Ukraine?

Everyone else has asked why.

I answered. Not all of it.

Something woke in me with that question. Since then I have been turning it over. Why — and what made. Not the same question. The second still open.

A guest in the house, God in the house — so the old saying goes in this country.

In the Alps the herds come down from the high pastures between Michaeli and the middle of October. In these mountains, at Pokrova.

The new count kept the conception of John on the equinox. The old count keeps it today — the Ivan of Kupala, nine months before the fires.

I crossed back over.

Day 108
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Journey | CC BY-SA 4.0
stewardship@ubec.network