Saint Melangell of Powys
Late Wednesday afternoon was not a time for phones or wallets.
The cottonwoods were already shedding, sprinkling the air with motes as weightless as the late day sunlight. You can’t catch their linty stipples; snatch as fast or as stealthily as you like, they just pass around and through your fingers on their descent toward the creek. The whole span of the water was awash in their fluid bokeh.
I don’t think I was ever aware that locust trees could smell like this. Had they always? I leaned closer to a flower to check if it was indeed their fragrance I was picking up. Their sweet traces followed me up the path as I shuffled toward the Detour.
Mr. Wendell was up there, making the neighborhood rounds on his lawnmower. There’s an easy way to tell the town locals from the part-time renters and corporate homeowners: the latter two would always hire an overpriced, underpaid landscaping team to cut their grass while the locals called Mr. Wendell. He saw me and gave his standard two-finger salute as he rounded the next corner.
I took the lane leading off the Detour so I could take another look at the Narnia lamp. Some people think Lucy met Tumnus by a lamppost in Aslan’s land, and certainly that’s the case, but it’s here, too. Just past the road that will take my daughter home from school. The lamp looks different in the mid-day light. I tell my daughter to go visit it after the sun sets. The time to check for fawns is dusk, I remind her, always in the dusk.
The forest was as welcoming as always, and I was thankful for that. I was, however, having trouble keeping myself to myself. The prior insanities of the day kept encroaching onto the lane, insisting they walk with me. Sometimes that’s okay. It’s important to let them have their say from time to time. But they’ve been altogether too chatty as of late and I was here to seek some solitude.
I didn’t get it. In my first few crumpled leaf-brown footsteps down the trail, I came across a robin. I love robins. Their unfinished songs remind me of early spring mornings in the house that grew me up. I’d wake to robin calls and look out my window. Watch the bright spring sunlight throw a kaleidoscope across the dewy leavings of the previous night’s frost. Robins were the sound of cold kitchen mornings and my mother smiling at the window because it was Saturday.
The robin doesn’t fly away, though. He forages in the leaves, takes two steps forward and stays there. I take a step myself, careful to give him space. Again he picks at the ground, hops forward along the path and again I follow.
It goes on like this for ten yards or so. Twenty, then thirty. He turns his head, then starts again, always down the path and never off it. Sixty yards becomes a hundred. He and I share the walk for the better part of a mile. He only flies away when we reach the terminus: another robin screeches and reminds him of their avian property lines. My friend flies toward the water and I hope he knows that I owe him now. We’re travel companions, he and I.
Some say Saint Melangell’s story is just an allegorical teaching tool meant to explain her spiritual significance and based on a Welsh fairy tale. It’s not meant to be taken literally.
What I say is that the more I encounter this kind of flat attention, utterly insisted upon throughout our world’s housing developments, strip malls and offices, the more I understand why she sought her green martyrdom in the first place.
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