Concordance of the unknown…I ~ 5

Later, when she tried to recall the journey, she remembered nothing of the miles covered that first day. She could still see the neighbors waving, her sight blurred by tears, and the baby bundled in her lap. But the long hours of riding, the meals unwrapped from the basket and eaten at the roadside, the children running and napping and crying — all that was lost.

How hard it had been that first night, asking shelter from strangers. The cart had drawn up in front of the small, rough-hewn stone house sheltered below the branches of an ancient cedar. The rabbi’s house. Berti had told her the name, described the house and the tree.

How often she had opened her own door to the timid knock of a passing traveler, made welcome the men and the families who knew there would be warm food, a clean bed. But now, to stand at this solid wood door with its iron hinges, the baby in her arms, the two children clinging to her skirt, she felt she had suddenly inhabited someone else’s life, become someone unknown, a stranger to herself…