We are on a second honeymoon. In July 1979 we drove our little yellow mini from Comber through France and into Switzerland. We stayed in the beautiful medieval cité of Gruyères (where the cheese comes from), a château town with a castle (now a museum) and magnificent views of the lower Alps, some peaks with splashes of snow. Our room now, as then, overlooks a cradle between the mountains. Little has changed in the landscape and we can still hear the cowbells clinking against the silence of the early morning.
Château de Gruyères
As I sit on the balcony and breathe in the clear air emitted by the pine forest below, it reassures and somehow humbles me that these mountains have stood here immutable for forty years while everything in my life has changed. I am a mother and grandmother; I have worked and retired; I have travelled and stayed put; I have loved and lost; I have been foolish and grown wiser. With the poet of old I lift my eyes to the hills and acknowledge that my help comes from the Lord, who like the mountains is eternal, unchanging and foundationally faithful.
The man and I have been counting our blessings and naming our loves. On the anniversary, we stood face to face at the altar in L'église Saint-Théodule. Through tears we thanked each other for forty years of faithfulness, kindness and trust and vowed again to keep loving to the end. Sadly, this is a more daunting prospect than it seemed in our youth when we said 'for better for poorer, in sickness and in health'. Although in good spirits we have seen enough of death and suffering to know what loving to the end may mean, and we are as up for it as anyone basking in the Swiss sunshine can be.
The vagaries of love has been a theme of this grand tour in Italy and Switzerland. On the streets of Verona I followed a travelling production of Romeo e Giulietta as they ran to and from the terrible consequences of loving across a divide. In the ancient amphitheatre we also watched the desperate Aida sacrificing herself for love of Radames, sharing his fate in a sealed crypt as they sang of 'immortale amor'. Two pairs of lovers who choose to die together rather than renounce their love. We truly hope that our end will not be a tragic as theirs, but desperate love tears at the heartstrings and leaves us enchanted and deeply moved.
Italy's landscape is dotted with the magnificent Tuscan cypress with its pencil straight back reaching into the blue. I am reminded of Khalil Gibran's musings on marriage:
'Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.' (The Prophet)
Speaking of Hercules, further south we visited Pompeii and Herculaneum and considered the fate of thousands who fled or failed to flee the magma and ash of Vesuvius, still brooding over the Bay of Naples. I have been reading Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan novels which focus on lives and loves over a lifetime of friendship. In her fourth and final book of the series she writes:
'Each of us organises memory as it suits him.'
Of course we all want to erase the bad and focus on the good. Together, the man and I have reminisced and remembered and there have been difficult conversations as we address our fragility and failures, but our abiding sense is that we are enveloped in the outstretched arms of the mountain maker. For the briefest of moments we get to join in the worship that emanates from all the majestic beauty declaring his glory. That is ours to do, whatever comes our way in the next forty years.
Thank you, husband, for loving me so well.
'If I say I love you...then I love you.' (Mumford & Sons)
Verona
