My sister, the Pilgrim

My youngest sister took off a couple of months from life this summer to walk the Santiago Pilgrimage trail across northern Spain. It was a life dream. She went with her daughter, Grace, who is a student at Evergreen College, and who got credit for her experience! Tomorrow, she'll be heading back to her life as a tile artist in the northwest. And Grace will be heading off to adventures in Egypt!

When she gets home she will, no doubt, be punished for doing this amazing and selfish thing. It's part of the territory for those of us who take off from time to time.

I have been so interested in their travels as I have heard from emails along the way. Irene is soon to be sixty three, a master swimmer and up for anything. What an adventure!

My littlest sister has done an awesome thing and her grandchildren will love the tales about it. I have had a teeniest bit of envy I won't deny. But I have had many adventures as well, and I am not at all sure I could have walked 800 miles in two months as they did. I loved hearing the answers to my questions about the trail, the people she met, the conditions, the food .. The religious part of it is hard for me to understand, but the artistic part is so real.

Just think about this. Irene, a tiny, fit woman, walks all this distance wearing a handmade dress every day that has emblazoned on it a large virgin Mary on the front and on the back. Early on in the trek she shaved her head in front and made dreadlocks in back. And so, she was known along the trail.

I salute this! I think of the treks I made with my best friend through the Amazon forests at night, pawing through the vines, looking for snakes,dressed in jungle gear,(not thinking about hair-dos) and never encountering so much as a smidgen of Catholicism. We were pikers!

All these two months Irene has been on her pilgrimage, I have followed her progress on my map. I dream about her, I think about where she is now, she is in my thoughts. I know she has put one foot in front of the other for so many miles it must have put her soul at ease.

I am hoping that Irene will make a tile composite about the pilgrimage.

Back here in the Green Swamp we are preparing for the party of a lifetime and Irene will be there! I shall make time to hear in detail about the pilgrimage.

Not to be too smug, but everyone ought to have sisters. My two are so amazing in their special ways.