From the bookshop window

What you don’t know about Bernadette is that she was never born.

She just was one day.

On a rainy morning on a corner of some street in some small town she just became. Sadly no one was around to see her become what it was that she was destined to be. I wish that I had been there. Present, there on that rainy street, to see the origins of the woman for whom I love so deeply.

Her hair reminds me of mud if the mud were sprinkled with gold flecks. Her shoulders are deeply freckled and each one overlaps another, telling stories from summers long ago or from some paintbrush held by God.

Across the street from her bakery stands an old bookshop. Sometimes I sit in the bookshop at the window on the bench that has been there since Jesus was a boy. I sit and I watch her hands as they press firmly into the dough of an unbaked loaf of bread or the sticky concoction that will, undoubtedly, become the greatest cookies ever created.

I watch her not in lust or desire. I watch her not for personal enjoyment or because I gain anything from this action. But I watch her because, to me, she is something that I have never seen before and will never see again.

Today it is raining.

I walked to the bakery to see and talk to her. But as I got closer and closer to the bakery I could see that all the windows were covered in brown packing paper and the door handles were gone and replaced with heavy chain and a pad-lock. I tried peering in through slits in the paper-covered windows but could only see flour and yeast covered floors. No tables, no oven, no bowls…no Bernadette.

I turned and looked into the street in utter ponderment, my eyes focusing and re-focusing on the slick-shiny cobblestones. I thought about where she could have gone and why she would ever leave. As my eyes wandered they stopped on a space, a gap, where a stone should have sat. In its place laid a puddle of water. As I looked closer I could see at its bottom a bed of mud sprinkled with gold flecks.