The Window Open

Wake-up feel: 7.

The first thoughts went to the dream. An apple tree, full, the apples big. Some falling. Many already on the ground, all over the place.

Then to my family, as every morning.

Bones and muscles aching. Yesterday was the pathway — laid with the stones the mountain gives. The ground here is heavy with clay; when it rains it turns to a sticky goo. Fix the paths, the children said at the summer camp, among their suggestions. Next year they will find a surprise.

Rain in the night. This morning fog rising from the forest floor, and the streams running full. Months of dry — the mountain has had its blessing. The water has started to drip into the trough once again.

I went up the pathway. Birds greeted me — small ones. I cannot say which. I cannot see them. Only the chirping.

Comforting.

At the first pasture, no cow. No bells to be heard in the distance this morning. At one edge of the pasture a house — a shelter, or a shepherd's house from days long gone. Partly still standing. The window open.

Logs like these were felled on an old moon, in the cold months, so the wood would not rot or draw the worm. Every carpenter in these mountains knew it. The Romans wrote it down. Nobody needed the book.

Yesterday the earth held until the afternoon, then the turn to water — at the hour the rain was gathering. Today water, the whole day. The moon two nights past full, its light waning, its arc climbing. What that means was known by people who watched the sky, the ground, and their own bodies for lifetimes before anyone printed a table. Some in these mountains may hold it still. We are learning it back.

This valley counted the moon before it counted anything else. The young moon, the full, the old moon, the dark days between when nothing is begun. Beginnings on the young. Cuttings on the old. The herd goes up on the young moon and the warm; timber and the herd come down on the old and the cold.

Two mornings ago the full moon rose eaten at one edge, over the old-style Dormition. Eleven days before that the first apples went to the dead.

I set the dream beside that. I do not read it.

Nobody had closed the window.

Day 71
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Journey | CC BY-SA 4.0
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