Words

                                                                                           Larry

                                                                                           Lychgates
 

Dear Reader,

In the Middle Ages before mortuaries, and at the time when more people died at home, the dead were placed on a bier and taken to the lychgate where they remained, often attended against body snatchers, until the funeral service, when may have been a day later.

Many older churches have a lychgate built over the entrance to the church grounds.  The lychgate marks the division between consecrated and unconsecrated ground, and was the place where the bearers sheltered with the coffin before a burial.

                                                                         *

Larry who was born in 2007 is a British domestic tabby cat who has been Chief Mouser at 10 Downing Street since 2011.  He is cared for by Downing Street staff and is not the personal property of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.   

There is evidence of a cat in residence in the English Government dating back to the reign of Henry V111 when Cardinal Thomas Wolsey placed his cat by his side while acting in his judicial capacity as Lord Chancellor.

Apparently Sir Keir Starmer has got a cat so Larry will have company.  I wonder whether he will enjoy sharing his home.  Well we shall see, as with everything else with our new government.

                                                                            *

From Dorothy Wordsworth  July 2nd  1802 in Westmorland

' A very rainy morning.  there was a gleam of fair weather, and we thought of walking into Easedale. Molly began to prepare the linen for putting out, but it rained worse than ever.'

From William Cowper  July 3rd  1782 in Buckinghamshire

'I shiver with cold on this present third of July......Last Saturday night the cold was so severe that it pinched off many of the young shoots of our peach trees....The very walnuts, which are now no bigger than small hazelnuts, drop to the ground; and the flowers, though they blow, seem to have lost their odours.   I walked with your mother yesterday in the garden, wrapped up in a winter surcoat, and found myself not at all encumbered by it.'

                                                                                *

Words

 

We met at the lychgate,

a small, silent group,

walked past gravestones,

some mossy-old, some well tended,

some overgrown, forlorn, forgotten.

 

Rain poured into the just-dug earth,

then a surprise of sunlight

filtered through the trees.

The casket was lowered

as we murmured about God’s

enfolding love, His safe keeping,

the peace He will give us, leave us.

 

Words, words, words, but 

the inscription on the headstone

were the words that mattered;

bore witness to her existence.

 

To make an end of it

was what we had to do,

taking comfort not from all the spoken words,

but from the written few.

 

                                                                               *

 

With very best wishes, Patricia