Ryan returned to the passages that cast the story with its romance, to the hidden glade in the woods of which only Aliena then knew; where Jack followed and found and spoke to her alone. It became the sanctuary where they learned and discovered one another; where Jack read poetry and stories learned from his mother in youth, where Aliena told and read her own, and where Jack began to write and live a romance with Aliena becoming, unknowingly, its love and heroine.
It was where Jack first kissed her, a delicate accent ending spoken story; the story left deliberately open-ended, for how could such be told without knowing first the heroine’s response. His kiss touched her—delicate and revealing—continuing where his story paused, communicating his hope to make their romance true.
For their lifetime after, the glade became their private place in the world; where they met and made love in the open light of the world where, even as their bodies aged, their spirits loved with living youth. It was a place, and love, forever theirs.
The story led Ryan, too, to dream. He wanted a place for them—for her—a sanctuary to share; where they might live and love with abandon beyond the eyes of the world; where he might read to her his stories accented with voice, presence, kiss, and touch—giving greater effect than simple words left alone to hope their words might find her eyes and touch her heart. He wanted a place where she might, too, tell and share her thoughts—all she wished for him to know—and where they might give and discover in even greater ways.
He imagined. He dreamed. He searched. He wanted to live and make them real.
*****
He found it in a wooded draw beside a stream that fell away into shallow canyon beneath a pond where the stone of the pond’s dam gave way, and the sandstone on which the dam relied to hold and keep the water held proved softer than perceptions of its hardened face. Surrounding the draw and pond were open pastures in all directions.
In the rains of spring, water overflowed from the pond and cut a free-stone stream from the broken point of the dam across the flat sheet of sandstone exposed in the wearing of water’s flow. Currents pooled and purled in eddying pockets where hard rock held and softer pockets of stone carved out into contoured depressions that became the course and maze through which the water ran.
From the small stone-bed run, the stream fell away in veiled cascade of waterfall down into the canyon’s beginning. Beneath, the stream broke and branched into two runs framing an island in the middle that grew with fine-stemmed grasses in the spring across the open-wooded understory before trees leafed out to shade the forest floor and cast the light of the sun into kaleidoscopic arrays that danced and changed in summer and autumn winds.
In the center of the glade, there was a clearing that stayed in eternal light. In this place grew a single mountain laurel, vestige of a homestead since returned to earth; a relic of dreams and former home as settlers left the Appalachian foothills for the promise of richer soils at the edge of frontier prairies. In the late of spring, the laurel would bloom, opening her petals—delicate, pale-pink, and lovely—for he that knew and waited for her wonder. In the glade the laurel would reveal her beauty, her hidden hue and tenderness, guarded and protected, until moment of her spreading bloom. To Ryan, there was magic in the laurel’s being, and, year after year, he returned to the glade and waited to hold witness to her bloom, her beauty, and colored revelation.
*****
He imagined her there, her smile and skin in sunlight, resting upon a blanket strewn above the fine-stemmed grasses that matted beneath into softened bedding where both he and she would lie. He imagined her there, in sanctuary known and shared by only them. He imagined her there; golden light upon bodies cast pure through leafless boughs above. He imagined her body beneath, making love in the new light warmth of spring to the sound of falling water and an after-song of drifting stream.
He imagined her too in summer’s shade, beneath the canopy of timber where bodies cooled in rest from stronger heat from summer sun and passions shared. He imagined her body bare against his own as he held her close and listened to whispers of the woods in summer breeze as light filtered through the leaves and danced like windblown stars.
He imagined her lips, her warmth, her hold, and how it would be to live their romance; to have a place—only theirs—where they might share and live, again and again, for the expression of shared bodies, minds, and spirits.
He imagined and wondered how they would change in their progression of years; their bodies like the course of the stream, or height of trees, ever advancing and redefining as time continued onward like waters of the stream.
He wanted her. He wanted her there. His heart and eyes were fixed, and while he did not know the answer or the course to make it true, he acknowledged the truth of his soul and sought to win her just as Jack had done: by stories of love and heart told apart from a world too ready to dismiss the magic existing in hearts that live passion.
He wanted the Dream. He wanted her. He wanted to give completely of himself and to have her beneath a blue spring sky as golden light fell as halo through the frame of the canyon down upon them in their hidden glade beneath. He wanted to lay with her in their after on bed of fine-stemmed grasses laid flat and comforting beneath strewn blanket upon which they made their love. He wanted to rest with her, to listen to their hearts and the sounds of their sanctuary as spring-stream sang in soft melody through drifting waters of dancing light. He wanted to make love to her again—in the sanctuary’s music, light and feel—and to live it all as real.
He wanted the Dream. He wanted her.
He did as Jack had done.
He wrote it in a story: waiting for the day when his heart had opportunity to show and, from its revelation, the romance might live real.
*The story referenced and inspiring this writing is found in Ken Follet’s “Pillars of the Earth.”