August30
Last Sunday was the
Feast of Our Lady's Most Pure Heart– whose Mass I love well,
and the whole day was beautiful. Beautiful, I mean, for me,
although the weather was cloudy and it rained in the morning. After
Chapter I was on the kitchen-refectory squad and spent one hour
going around the one hundred and ninety-two places counting out
four thin cookies for each Trappist and handing out various very
small bon-bons and some stuff that pretended to be candied orange.
I was very happy doing all this, not because of the candy, which
nauseates me, but because of God and Our Lady, and the Feast
Day.
In the afternoon I
went out to the old horsebarn with the Book of Proverbs and indeed
with the whole Bible, and I was wandering around in the hay loft,
where there is a big gap in the roof, and one of the rotting
floorboards gave way under me and I nearly fell
through.
Afterwards I sat and
looked out at the hills and the gray clouds and couldn't read
anything. When the flies got too bad, I wandered across the bare
pasture and sat by the enclosure wall, perched on the edge of a
ruined bathtub that has been placed there for the horses to drink
out of. A pipe comes through the wall and plenty of water flows
into the bathtub from a spring somewhere in the woods, and I
couldn't read there, either. I just listened to the clean water
flowing and looked at the wreckage of the horsebarn on top of the
bare knoll in front of me, and remained drugged with happiness and
with prayer. Presently the two mares and the two colts came over to
see me and to take a drink. The colts looked like children with
their big grave eyes, very humble, very stupid and they were tamer
than I expected. They came over and nudged me with their soft
muzzles and I talked to them for a bit and then Father Nabor who
was hiding behind some sumacs a hundred paces away came out to see
what was the matter.
Later on I saw other
interesting things–for instance a dead possum in a trap and a
gold, butter-and-egg butterfly wavering on the dead possum's back.
There are many Rhode Island reds over in the southwest corner of
the enclosure this year. When I was on retreat for ordination to
the priesthood I did half a day's work on the roosts we were
building for them then.
