A Walk Postponed

Image credit: Albergues del Camino de Santiago

A couple of months ago, I got a letter and a gift in the mail from my friend Rose, who died in August 2019.

I was expecting to hear from her. Rose has visited me before (When the Dead Speak).

I met her over a platter of chicken and rice swarming with flies in a hive shaped albergue on the hot plains of Spain. After dinner and a few glasses of Spanish rioja, she invited me to chat in her private attic bedroom before I headed to my own bunk in the crowded dormitory below (Rose would go on to secure the best private rooms through most of the six years that we were friends, a tendency I alternately admired and envied).

When I moved to Spain less than six months after we met, it was Rose’s Camino words that propelled me through an astounding array of paperwork: “You could teach English here. Why don’t you move to Spain?” So began an odyssey filled with adventure most mothers of three only dream about. Rose visited me in Madrid (my landlady adored her) and in Pamplona where I met her daughter one evening as they passed through on their own mother-daughter Camino.

So when it comes to big decisions, What Would Rose Do? isn’t a reach. She was there for some of my biggest, poking, prodding, pushing, and making plans right alongside me.

She would have hated the pandemic of 2020. Quarantine, bubbles, curtailed travel plans, and adult children who very likely wouldn’t have been able to travel from Edinburgh and London to visit her. Rose had a strong sense of civic responsibility and pride, but she would have grieved the loss of spontaneous calls to join pals for a pint at the pub or invite friends home for a chat.

All makes me wonder what she would have said about my recent decision not to walk from Shrewsbury to Rome in 2021, a walk I want to make to honor her memory and take her with me from her home to a city she loved and insisted I must see. A walk that started this blog last August.

Vaccine delays and travel restrictions, more lockdowns in Europe, and an unclear work trajectory conspired to whisper “This is not the year” in my ear. Rose would have applauded my single-minded personal Camino to pay off my debt, build my book coaching business, revisit my own book revisions, and explore snagging the elusive one-year Spanish visa. That 90-day tourist visa restriction was making the road from Canterbury to Rome sound more like a race than a wander; with a longer Spanish visa like the one I had when I moved to Spain, I might be able to take my time.

If I’m not making my walk this year, what am I writing about? Does this blog have another purpose? What will My Slow Road be if I’m not researching next steps for my next long walk. What’s the point?

I don’t know really. I’d like to confer with my friend Rose, because I’m certain she’d have something to say on the subject. I’d like to ask you, too, who have happened on or subscribed to this blog in anticipation of a journey, or who read out of love or friendship or curiosity. What is the point of a blog about a walk that cannot yet be walked?

Several months after Rose died of a brain tumor, her son wrote to tell me he’d found a card with my name on it in a cupboard in Rose’s Shrewsbury home.

Nearly a year later, when I saw the letter from England on my chair, I knew Rose’s message had arrived. I opened the card and an earring fell out of the envelope and onto the floor. Rose had gifted me two pairs of earrings from her collection and she thanked me for my friendship. “I think we made it work, don’t you?”

I looked for more, turning the card over, reading between the lines, listening for her voice like a spiritualist in a Victorian parlor game. I’m waiting for another sign.