Shadow Flutter

I’m reading Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in small chunks, enjoying gorgeous prose, wonderful landscape descriptions, and fascinating vignettes about the characters she and her husband meet as they travel through Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, etc.   The book comes in at 1,300 big pages, and has yet to lose my interest.   West had great command of language, an artist's eye for countryside and detail, and a piercing understanding of the passions simmering within the people she meets.    I’d like to share with you parts of a chapter named Two Castles . One castle is a monastery and the other a hospital for those who have contracted tuberculosis.   Both are actual castles converted, but it is the second castle, the hospital, that I’m interested in.   The doctors were competent, even excellent, but they had a very different view of how to treat the physically ill from western doctors.   Here the patients were free to roam around and...

On the drive up here I thought about how miserable this was going to be. I always enjoyed going to Grandma's house, meeting my cousins, sitting around the dining room table eating dinner with the family, sharing exaggerated stories about all the things that had happened to one another since last we met. This time was different. When we arrived, my aunt and uncle greeted mom and dad and walked together into the house. I lingered, remembering all the times as a child I would jump from the car, run up the front porch stairs, and shout, "Grandma! Grandma! We're here." The chestnut trees still litter the ground with their autumn harvest. When I was young, I would try roasting them in the fireplace like Nat King Cole told us to. Each Christmas they found their way into the house onto strings decorating the walls wishing good tidings to all who entered. The ivy, still covering the front yard, weaves its lush, emerald carpet along the ground up the latticework onto the fron...