The Ancient Ladies‘ Adventure
„R is lonely,“ M told me after a visit to our friend who lives on her farm in the Sierra foothills.
R? R , whose home was almost always filled with visitors—friends, friends of friends, neighbors seeking advice on herbal remedies, wanting to learn about wild plants with healing power, strangers who dropped in because they had heard how hospitable she and her life partner Arlo were, stayed for dinner and the night and eventually had to be asked to leave, R was lonely?
We have been friends for more than fifty years, but I had not seen her much in a good while. She is an artist, an herbalist, a poet. She and Arlo raised four children, all with families of their own now, then she had spent a long and difficult time caring for Arlo as he lay fatally ill. After his death she had succumbed to grief. But R is not someone who will stew in misery. So perhaps that‘s why, in early October, a message arrived: She had rented a tiny cottage north of Bodega Bay for five days. Four of her friends wanted to go, including M. There was room for six. Would I like to join them?
I said yes, but not without some apprehension. I had never met one of the women and barely remembered meeting two others. Five days could be a long time if we didn‘t get along, six old biddies in a tiny cottage.
Well, we had a great time and I now write this report to urge all older folks who read this: It‘s good to seek opportunities to hang out with your contemporaries, there‘s a pleasant ease to be discovered that comes naturally because it‘s ok, all kinds of glitches happen as the brain shrinks and other old people understand as younger folks can‘t.
The minute we started messing around in the kitchen, things started to disappear.
„Anyone see the olive oil? I know I put it here on the counter,“ someone said.
„Right here on the table,“ came the answer, without „where I just saw you put it, in
front of you,“ which a daughter or grandchild might have added.
„I brought a bottle of Pinot but it‘s gone from my bag,“ I lamented. A quick
search proved fruitless.
„Nevermind, I brought some rosé,“ someone offered.
The following afternoon I couldn‘t find my hiking shoes. I had taken them off and put them near the kitchen door but someone else‘s similar shoes were in that spot. No problem. M had brought an extra pair and they fit me. No reason to waste time now looking. We‘d find then later, no need to delay our walk to the beach.
If this had happened at a gathering with younger people, I would have been embarrassed, wondered if they were ticking off another clue that senility had set in and it would soon be time to send me to a safe facility. But here among my contemporaries I felt no judgement.
Cell phones were lost and found. Glasses disappeared and were rediscovered. Each time something that had gone missing turned up was cause for celebration. I remembered that my mother, who lived over a hundred years, often lost the reading glasses she carried around with her even after macular degeneration had stopped her from reading. Finding them was always a tiny moment of joy.
After dinner on our last night in the cabin, I reached behind my right ear and realized the hearing aid was missing. These tiny silvery devices are extremely expensive, so everyone jumped up to search with flashlights.
„Ask Kunegunda to help,“ said Robyn. „she finds lost things.“
I had always called on St. Anthony. I had not heard that St. Kunegunda provided the same service. Why ask a man to do something a woman can do? So we appealed to the 13th century saint, women to woman.
Immediately, the hearing aid materialized: It was caught in my hair. But then I noticed that the left one was gone. I had taken it out to show people what it looked like and put it on the table--but had forgotten that I had soon picked it up again and put it back into my ear.
Oh joy! We laughed and clinked glasses. In the end, everything reappeared, including my hiking shoes (behind the kitchen door) and even the bottle of Pinot, which was right where I thought I had put it and where several of us had looked.
We hiked on the long beautiful beach at Salmon Creek, on blufftop trails, to boulders with mysterious smooth spots that, according to legend, were polished by mammoths rubbing themselves on the rock. We watched egrets and herons standing still for what seemed like hours, we bought fresh fish at the market in Bodega Bay and sauteed it, and we talked and talked, and parted as friends.
It was grand, our Ancient Ladies‘ Adventure. Feel free to copy, dear reader, or design your own variant. There are joys yet to be discovered in old age.
A Strong-Willed Princess and Saint
Kunegunda, AKA Kinga, was born in 1234, the third child of the king of Hungary, Belos IV. Before she married, she persuaded her husband-to-be to take a vow of chastity with her. For this she earned high praise from clergy and was held up as a model for young girls.
After her husband died, she devoted herself to good works and to supporting the church. She joined the Poor Claires, a sisterhood founded by Saint Claire, died in a monastery in 1292, and was later beatified. In 1715, Pope Benedict XIII declared her to be the protector of the Lithuanian-Polish Republic. Her sainthood was announced in 1999 by John Paul II.
Almost all the above information about Kunegunda comes from an article in Bernardinai.lt, a Lithuanian Catholic publication. I found nothing about a belief that she will help people find lost objects the way St. Anthony does. But neither has anybody shown that she doesn’t.
Saint Kunigunda, protector of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic
Credit: Bernardinai.lt, 2017/07/24