Post 17/2025 Goshen, Indiana: Friends. Friends are worth their weight in gold. Lynne and Noel are storing a few of our things. The evening before we left Carbis Bay, Marilyn and Steve had us over for dinner. Next day, Steve drove us to the St Erth train station for the five and a half hour trip to London, where we stayed overnight. Many bade us a fond farewell.

Smooth travel. No hitches, though we had a scheduled longish layover in Detroit. Gwen and Dean picked us up in South Bend and took us to Goshen. Friends. Again, I say, “Friends!” Thank you.

Happy to get home. Greeted neighbors. Planted flowers. Settled in for a week before our annual trip to the Stratford Festival of Canada. Sadly, Gwen and Dean are unable to go this year. We’ve shared the experience for at least 40 years.

Attended services at College Mennonite Church. I quote stanza 1 of an opening hymn, God is here among us (by Gerhard Tersteegen, 1729, translated from German): “God is here among us: come with adoration, fervent praise and expectation. God is here within us: known beyond believing, soul in silent awe receiving. God will name and will claim those beheld as lowly, making all things holy.”

“Known beyond believing,” strikes in me a happy, resounding, reassuring cord. It corresponds to a hymn we sang recently at St Anta & All Saints in Carbis Bay: “How lovely are the feet of him who brings good news; announcing peace, proclaiming news of happiness: our God reigns!”

Refrain: “Our God reigns, our God reigns, our God reigns, our God reigns, our God reigns!”

The hymns drive home the truth of lives well-lived, thinking now of two memorial services coming up, one for a friend in Cornwall who died in her 96th year and a great nephew in Indiana who died at age 35, after coping with brain cancer for nine years. We grieve for each loss, for those loved-ones who remain behind, grief that knows healing has come and is coming in enduring hope. God with us.

Photos span the Atlantic

Back home again in Indiana
And it seems that I can see
The gleaming candlelight still shining bright
Through the sycamores for me

The new-mown hay sends all its fragrance
From the fields I used to roam
When I dream about the moonlight on the Wabash
Then I long for my Indiana home

Books

On the plane I read one of M.C. Beaton’s Scottish Highlands-based books, Death of a Village, a Hamish Macbeth murder mystery. Now I’m reading The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey, by Tim Hannigan (Head of Zeus, An Apollo Book, 2023).

I may come up with a review, but for now a quote from the back cover must suffice: “Tim Hannigan undertakes an epic east-west journey on foot through his own homeland, from the woodlands of the Tamar Valley to the remote western region of Penwith. As he walks, he explores how the Cornwall of the popular imagination has been constructed by writers, artists and others, and how myths, projections and tropes intersect with the real Cornwall–its landscapes, histories, communities and sense of self.”

This epigraph set the mood for Chapter Eight of Death of a Village: “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties / And things that go bump in the night, / Good Lord deliver us!” Old Scottish prayer

Be well.

-John