Blessings & Marvels Basket

Kisung Koh

Granoldi was a polar white Bear who had been saved from the medieval travelling show some decades earlier by the Franciscan community on the hill … or more exactly, by Francis, himself. He had come to settle in the encampment, ere before the community had a formal name at a time when the Brothers in Unity resided amongst the trees and scrub, long before there were lodgings to house them or their chapel. 

For his early participation in this very blessed history, he was revered, and also held to be a personal friend of the deceased Saint. Those who remained all respected the elderly bear in ways that the elderly should be respected. He was watered and fed and much loved.

He never failed to show up for breakfast, or Mass, with the exception of those times of his long rest of hibernating slumber. During this sleep, he would be coddled beneath an old cart that was covered with the shielding shade of a rainbow cloth, now faded from the elements.

Hannah Mary, who was also a pioneer of the early Community, would check on him several times of the day during his sabbaticals, even though the steep path up the small mountain was wearing to her aged bones. She had forgotten to count the years as they had come and gone - taking from her one by one, her brother, her daughter, her loved ones.

She knew by the plaque that rested in the stone wall of the founding block, that she must have overshot her eightieth year, but more than that could not be said of her. She never once asked herself how it was that Granoldi had remained living for so long. Magic, and all things magical, were simply and plainly accepted.

These findings were put into the blessings and marvels basket: whereupon little miracles were never to be questioned, lest they evaporate under the scrutiny, leaving only endless wonderings in their place.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Finding Self - Second Guesses- Azlander Series