Photo credit: Emily Joy Stroble
I wish you friends in other countries with spare rooms, containing large beds topped with puffy comforters, heavy as a snow drift, so that, after almost twenty-four hours on taxis, planes, trains, and your own tired feet, you can wake up from dreamless sleep and stretch like a cat in watery sunlight.
Then you can rummage in your suitcase for a sweater and pad in your socks as softly as you can down stairs with unfamiliar creaks and groans, waking the dogs by accident so that they are waiting for you when you emerge from the bathroom.
I wish for you to sift through cabinets like a burglar, dogs still on your heels, before your friend’s absolutely insane method of kitchen organization compels you to give up on finding the tea. And I wish for you to stir up the embers in the stove in a cheerful dining room, and smell the deep scent of wood smoke, and smile at the sunlight winking off a neat row of china plates in the hutch.
I wish for you to sigh into a well-broken-in couch in the library after tracing a finger along your friends’ books. I hope you open the volume you always meant to borrow but don’t read. Just enjoy the quiet.
While your friends may not have the (dubious) advantage of jet lag, I do hope they eventually wake up, the golden retrievers mobbing them at the foot of the stairs. I hope they laugh when they show you that the tea was in the only cabinet you didn’t check or in the canister on the counter the whole time.
I wish for you to have a breakfast that is soon forgotten, either because you were caught up in the company of friends you have not seen in years, or because you are busy making plans for the day, or because you are just present without regard for remembering.
I wish for you to be surprised by a crisp, blue sky at the beginning of an English October. (You will, of course, prepare for rain.) I wish for you to marvel at it as you pile into the car with the dogs.
It will feel strange to be a passenger on what is usually the driver’s side. The rolling ribbon of road through the purple heather and golden grass rises up to meet you. Powerless, you can only watch as sheep pointedly ignore you and wonder how long these mossy stone walls have kept the road in line.
I wish for you to pull into a village with a funny name and buildings made of stones the color of the bottom of a perfectly baked scone. While your friends take the dogs to run, I hope you wander down a street, glimpse a ruined castle tower through an ivy-covered gate, and stumble upon a bakery with a sandwich board that boasts of the best scones in the county. It is late, so most of the scones are gone, but there is shortbread.
I hope you have a thrifted jacket with a large enough pocket to cram a paper bag of treats inside.
I wish for the charmingly gothic church in this village to stand atop a gentle hill and for the sun-dappled slope to be dotted with slanted headstones, leaning casually like picnickers watching the sleepy square. I hope you follow a sign for a craft market in the village hall, and wander into an antique shop, and, on a whim, buy an odd little book of old stories.
I hope your shortbread and scones are no worse for wear when you share them in the car as you continue on your way.
I wish for you to be the only ones visiting the ruined abbey that presides over a jewel-toned valley. As you wander down the green-carpeted nave, in awe of the arched windows framing distant apple trees and vistas of softly gilded farmland, lovelier perhaps even than the stained glass that once was, I hope you startle the swallows into sudden susurration and watch their dark shapes wheel through a cerulean sky, impossibly high.
I wish for you to stay until the staff politely usher you out and for you to make your way to a low ceiling pub standing alone, but not lonesome, alongside the road in the heath.
I wish for you to have venison, cider, and laughter under dark, old beams, near a bright fire in a huge hearth while the dogs fall asleep with their heads on top of your feet beneath the table. And afterwards, I hope you wind your way homeward, sleepy and content as a child, trusting your friend’s knowledge of unfamiliar roads.
My wish for you is a day like one of the sweetest and best of my life, however troubled the world feels, however far you have come and however far you have left to go. I wish for you a Rivendell, a strange place made home-like by friends. I wish you joy and quiet and roofless beauty so wide and wild it makes you giddy. I wish for you to hold memories so rich that on the first crisp, blue-skied day in autumn you ache just a little with longing.
Emily Stroble is a writer of bits and pieces and is distractedly pursuing lots of novel ideas and nonfiction projects as inspiration strikes. As an editorial assistant at Zondervan, she helps put the pieces of children’s books and Bibles together. A lover of the ridiculous, inexplicable, and wondrous as well as stories of all kinds, Emily enjoys getting lost in museums, movies old and new, making art, the mountains of Colorado, and the unsalted oceans near Grand Rapids. Her movie reviews also appear in the Mixed Media section of The Banner and her strange little stories of the fantastic are on the Calvin alumni fiction blog Presticogitation. Her big dream is to dig her hands deep into the soil of making children’s books as an editor…and to finally finish her children’s novel.
