Life in France (indeed, life anywhere) evolves, unfolds. Even the best of plans are not exempt from the unexpected. And sometimes those events are not only beyond our control but also often beyond our wildest imagination. In the first book, A Bright Sun & Long Shadows I gave an account of the glorious and the gruesome events of the first four years of establishing our new life in France.
Most popular works in the genres of international living, cross cultural adjustment, and life transitions seem to stop after an apparent success has been established in the story line, as if such an adjustment to life was now complete, the chapter closed and "they live happily ever after". I believe that, often, there is an unconscious need, on the part of author and reader alike, to establish this "Happy-Ever-After" ending as permanent; a static state once reached, forever achieved, much like childhood images in fairy tales, or a heaven of harps, angels on floating clouds and that final reunion with long lost loved ones. There's a part of me that believes this is necessary for our personal short-term satisfaction. Such myths make life more bearable than the inevitable uncertainties that, in fact, we experience as life rolls along past the end of the most recent "last" chapter and into the realities that come next. The future reveals itself, emerging from nearly indistinguishable forms illuminated by slivers of moonlight, hopes to rise with the dawn, then, at last seen more clearly in the starkness of a noonday sun only to advance to twilight, dusk, darkness and another dawn.
In the long-haul of life, and in the inevitability of growing older one learns that, while that Genesis myth is true, "in the beginning all was good"; if we also live long enough we know that life is not static, nor is this originally created goodness invulnerable to the many hard knocks that continue long after that first garden is created, then grows, as the future becomes present and many presents in turn pass by. In the Judeo-Christian context of my faith, I witness that part of our human nature is, after all, a myth of our beginnings over and over, book after book, chapter after chapter of the rise and fall of life.
This is the stuff of which life stories are made, and such it is with this volume as a sequel to the first book, A Bright Sun and Long Shadows.
Indeed, after the first four years, we thought that we had "made it" through the worst of times and looked forward with a Robert Browning attitude, of the best yet ahead of us.
Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand who saith
"A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half;
trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"
-Robert Browning
