It was a winter that seemed to never end. Along the coast, the cold cast morning veils across the sea, ice crystals forming in fragile lines along the sand to crack and break in mornings of rising tide, touching and shattering ice lines left by receding sea in night.
Inland, the same fogs cast over the countryside, filling the open space between hedge rows dividing coastal plain into ordered sections of ownership that meant little under the rule and oversight of occupiers and absence of local men.
Marié was six. That winter, she held near in night to small fires to keep from freezing in her family’s country home. It was her mother, two sisters and her youngest brother of three. Her father and two older brothers were at war. After decisive defeat, or surrender, the resistance became small acts of insurgency, disruptions and harassments more than direct combat in the open against an overwhelming and superior force.
Marié remembered the conversation. It came on a winter night when a storm blew, when snow fell and built in drifts against the breaks of thick-walled hedge.
She asked her mother about the world as seen in her eyes, “Mother, why will this winter never end?”
“It will dear, be patient,” her mother answered.
“Why is it so harsh?” Marié questioned further.
“Every season is different. We learn something in them all.”
“Why is it so cold?”
“To remind us we need warmth.”
“And dark…why will the fog not leave, and when it does, it is snow and storm?”
“To remind us we need light.”
“Where can it be found?”
The light of the small-lit fire danced upon their faces, and in its warmth, Marié’s mother tapped light upon the little girl’s chest touching to her heart within.
“In here my little girl, always within…”
“Why is father gone?”
“To remind us, even when we feel abandoned, someone is working for our good in ways that we can’t see…”
Outside, the mechanized clatter of armored movements sounded, unseen, in the blindness of the storm.
Marié and her mother listened as the little girl hesitated for one final question.
“Mother, why are they here?”
“To remind us we all need a Savior.”
*****
That night, and every night after, the little girl prayed until a June dawn rose and there sounded new noises from the shore; when mohawked, uniformed men with dark-painted faces fell, like angels, from the sky and scattered invisible into hedgerows.
Against the sounds of shore, there was a new quiet, a different stillness in the countryside until the eternal battle of Good and Evil arrived and waged before her little eyes; and when it did—she prayed.
That June day, Marié’s prayers were answered. The endless winter broke in the arrival of saviors from shore and sky that would liberate her world by the shedding and letting of blood and drive away, forever, the reigning Darkness of that winter.