I always believed that stories told by great-grandmothers must be so, for their old eyes look inward and they recall. Or perhaps when it is something that has happened in the long-ago far beyond their lifespan or even those of generations preceding them they remember things that someone before them has remembered. I never knew whether this was something she had heard, or perhaps read in old letters yellowing in an attic, but only that it happened in the wilderness of Britain’s colony in the New World, in the long distant past on Christmas Eve. Time had diminished my great-grandmother to the weightlessness of a bird and as fragile, yet her dark eyes were bright with communication and undiminished life. At ninety she was as hale and active seemingly as ever she had been. As she spoke, glowing pictures formed themselves in my mind for she had the storyteller’s gift, punctuating her narrative with alert and vigorous gestures. Hers was the power to cause me to hear sounds out of the past and even as she would wrinkle her tiny, almost translucent nose I would capture a whiff of long forgotten odors.
What do You think about Miracle In The Wilderness?
