Thirty-seven

Wednesday was a very difficult day, mostly. After a lovely diner, complicated night's rest and an exceptional breakfast at the large Ferme/Chateau where I had slept - cared for very well by André and Danielle, who both spoke no English and were Octogenarians (meaning they lived through the worst of times and the best of times?), I'd set off with recriminations of the things I'd written about my dad.

Although they were the truth, as I saw it a long time ago, and, I think, people cannot read between the lines very well (Facebook is a simple medium, filled with people who have perhaps little real intellect to comprehend I wasn't actually attacking my father but wondering how it was he got the way he did (the final sentence was the lead off to a discussion of his father)), I was definitely feeling I'd said too much this time.

Family can have a different out-look on him, but their direct experience is another story really, and one I but rarely witnessed, and doesn't justify the witch hunt they persued. To cause blushes in my mother was her response always and 'what will people think?' is forever her worry.

So I was honest and cannot help telling the truth, not hiding difficult subjects beneath layers of forgetfulness.

Wednesday was wet, bloody atrociously wet, persistently. Like the mood, or spell I'd been thrust in by family reactions, I cried most of the day but it did go passed in a flash. The rivers of tears mixed with the dreadful drops of rain through my coat to my body washing away all my happiness down my legs into my boots where I trudged on to Chavanay with emotional puddles squelching me to my own Paschendaele.

On Wednesday I was going to stop completely, when having reached La Rhône river my spirit had all but vanished with the rains. But, by crossing that mass of water, I decided it is better I climb up to the Massif Central instead from today. Perhaps it has always been a cross I must deal with alone?