Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

Back home after our final road trip for 2025. We followed the Oregon Trail to Walla Walla, Washington, to spend a couple days with our friends Pat and Mary Anne. We talked about Catholicism and a certain 16^th century French writer and about baseball and recipes while a beef stew cooked slowly in a crock pot out in the kitchen.

They took us around to local vineyards. We visited an historical site managed by the National Park Service where a native culture first encountered European culture centuries ago and battles were fought and ended one way or another.

Over home-cooked meals and the best local wines we talked about wars and peace. Pat’s teaching a class about peace and forgiveness at a local college and is writing a biography of the anti-war priest, Daniel Berrigan. Mary Anne takes the Eucharist to people in the hospital and visits with them when there's nobody else around.

There was smoke in the morning air from West Coast fires when we all said our goodbyes for now and hugged.

Then Culley Jane and I followed the Oregon Trail back to our home in Colorado. Our granddaughter, River Orion, had done a good job of taking care of the cats, Jordy and Jackson, who thought about it, but then decided to forgive us for disappearing the way we did and were soon acting like nothing had happened.

And now it’s time to start getting ready for another winter. There's wood to cut and split and stack. You can never have enough.

And time to write... It’s 9/11 today. I still don’t know what happened, only that no way did that last building just fall down. Are there limits to forgiveness? I don't know. I'm not a cat. I do know that.

  Craig Chambers