Devonne Brown

Smile. 

I biked to the cathedral in the spring. I was an overweight 40 year old American woman on a bike tangled in British traffic. The underpass near the roundabout before the cathedral was scary, traffic came from everywhere and all directions. I should not have survived the rides into town.

 That’s the cloister walk. I hung out there every chance I got. I lived in Gloucester that spring, so the cloister walk, that cool tunnel with the awesome shade patterns, I breathed it. It’s cool and doesn’t echo like you think it would. All the windows and bridgework let the cobblestones click, but there’s not much of a kickback sound, so you don’t have to worry about telling secrets. You can speak at a normal tone. 

The cloister walk protected a sacred tree whose branches rode the ground. That’s not anywhere in the pamphlet about the cathedral, limbs as big as a man’s thigh curl and coil from the trunk of that ancient tree. The cathedral supports that magnificent tree. Someone thought its shade would grace the courtyard by the cloister. I bet they never thought that tree would grow this far this long. 

The cloister walk was meant for shuttling nuns from their convent to the cathedral and thinking. I thought a lot in the cloister walk or tried to. It’s also a tomb of gargantuan proportions. People are buried in the walls and floor. The rich ones’ names you walk over, read, or touch on the wall. The cool tombs are brass with pictures. Regular folks remain anonymous, maybe several deep. It’s happened in other churches in England. I wondered.

There were and probably still are some heavy vibes in the cloister walk, and that’s just a tiny part of the cathedral. There are spirits in a cathedral that go way back in time. In places, the air is foggy with them.

The twins were conceived that spring and born in Portsmouth in the winter.

Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge, those were my twins’ first destinations outside the home as human beings.  That’s where I took my infants before they could see and when they felt the most. Floppy headed babies, what ancient ghosties rocked their world that day? 

Riding around in a baby stroller staring up into the vaulted sky of the cathedral when they were cleared for public consumption had to blow their minds. What was it like to see glowing stained glass, smell Frankincense, and feel the cobblestone, copper plated tombs bump their backs from under the stroller? 

Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge were the first places they ever went. 

They will always walk in otherworldly energy,