You know, the details are important (regarding fiction)

It's important for you to know the background. The context. What makes you? What makes me? Why do I tell you this story? Did I need to tell you about my father? My mother's death? Why explain about me and her? Well the plot of this, my telling of it, ends up as an arrangement of the story. The notes. The score. I know. I'm trying to let you in on it. And I know too much - somehow - and you don't have enough information. I've got all the cards and you're left guessing and betting at the hand, my words, trying to sift and sort. How does it all happen? What's likely? What's compromised? Does it matter? Don't sweat it too much though. I expect you'll get close enough. And that's kind of a gift isn't it?

So somewhere along the line there'll be this story, of the town that is nothing if not religious. You could say that it's traditional, even ritualistic. That there is a kind of catholicism to its protestant sense. You may not, need not, go to church on Sunday yourself, but you most certainly will see to it that your kids go. Perhaps one of you will stay with them for church too. And of course on Easter and Christmas the whole family gathers in one church or another for the remonstrance of the passion, or the celebratory flair of the Christmas pageant. This all is part-and-parcel (as they say) of the coming-of-age of a small protestant sect that begins to look back at its roots and wonder how its forebears had the energy for all that devotion, rigour, and self-abnegation. How could one reach the conclusion that martyrdom was the only, the most favourable option? How could one suffer those slings and arrows?

And then I'll have to tell you another story too, about a love that you watch in full bloom and a death that arrives in full corruption. A love that stretches and breaks, like many others, only more slow and more concealed. Of a death that edges in, methodical, ineffable, inevitable. And how will we manage that? When it comes in a flurry, we ask how. We imagine ways we could have avoided it. We see the mistakes. The errors. The holes. The insufficiencies. We can, and this is key, blame ourselves. But when it arrives slow, steady, rising like a Red River flood, where do we aim the arrows then?


Rode to the village of Blumenort and back: 40 ks; 31.07 kph average; Wind SW 15 ks.