I spent a bare 24 hours in deepest, darkest Wiltshire last week.  It isn’t that deep, a couple of hours outside London and it isn’t that dark, the sun duked it out with the rain the whole time we were there.  And let’s be honest, 24 hours is hardly a trip, it’s a ‘tripette’ as my friend Fiona would say. In fact, she did say it as we piled into the car with my husband.

This little jaunt came into being last August.  I told David I was setting a part of my second novel in Wiltshire because I so enjoyed visiting with friends who weekend in one of Henry VII’s hunting lodges in Wiltshire.  “That’s in Hampshire,” David said.  Oh.  I guess I’d better look up a few things about Wiltshire, then.   “We can do better than that,” he said.  “Let’s take a drive out when we get back to England, and let’s take Fiona.”  So, I owe this tripette to David.

Wiltshire is the home of Salisbury Plain, Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge.  Oh, and about as many sheep as there are cows in all of Vermont.  It is also home to a tiny village called Lacock.  As you can imagine, our mispronunciation of the name Lacock was quickly corrected by Fiona and was an endless source of amusement to us all.   It is pronounced Lay-cock.  OK, spelled out this isn’t much better.  And, we got just tad lost trying to find it.  “Have a little faith,” David said.  When our map told us that we were, indeed, in Lacock, we cheered.  It is one of the most beautiful places and has appeared in countless films: masquerading as a village in several Harry Potters and a couple Jane Austens.  Some of the most quintessentially English countryside images on film owe themselves to Lacock.  We stayed at The Sign of the Angel.  It was lovely, ancient, and owes it’s name to an Elizabethan era gold coin.  I love that they display the original 16th Century kitchen draining board as if it were a priceless piece of art.  Which it is, really.

We had a nice wander around the village.  The houses lean companionably against each other as they have for centuries and the now empty Tithe Barn surprises you with its austere beauty.  Great, arching beams bend across the ancient brick and plaster ceilings echoing the cloisters down the road at the Abbey.  We stopped at a pub for a pint by the fire.  The hearth is huge and still boasts the 16th Century spit which owes its usefulness to the little ‘spitdog’ who ran around the ‘spitwheel’ which hangs on the wall by the front door.  The owner explained that spitdogs were bred specifically to run the wheel in two shifts.  One dog started and the other finished making sure that the slab o’ meat was done to a turn.  The starter dog only had to run first shift every other day and if the dog on call had hidden from his duty, the other one hunted him down.  I mean, it was his turn, after all.

We sat and watched the regulars ebb and flow through the pub, ducking their heads as they came in and out of the low-beamed front door.  An older gentleman took the table near ours and gave a polite nod to us.  Fiona gave her musical hello (“Hah-lo-oh!”) and the man was done for.  I rolled my eyes, I am distinctly unfriendly.  Here it comes, I thought, chit chat of the dullest sort.  Shame on me.  Under Fiona’s gentle questioning we learned about this elegant gentleman: how long he’d lived here, far from his home in the North, because he followed the woman he loved fifty years ago.  And, how he loved her and this village.  When she died, he couldn’t bring himself to leave, nowhere else felt like home anymore.  He told us that with a hitch in his voice.  He’s alone now, I thought.  This is sad.  I wish I didn’t know this about him.  Just then another, equally old guy came in.  He didn’t have to duck, his back was so bent by age he was nearly doubled over.  “Hullo, Dad,” he said to our new friend.  “Hullo, son,” our guy replied, and they both laughed.  “The usual?” they said to each other.  Both men were so far, FAR, from being alone or sad that I laughed not just at their little joke but at my sloppy, swift slide into melodrama.  Thanks, Fiona, I owe you.

That night we ate in the restaurant at our Inn.  Everything was delicious but nothing so much as the simple boiled new potatoes in butter and parsley.  Taking a bite was like opening your mouth to the moon as my mother used to say.  That first bite was so sweet, so clean it tasted like laughter.  Now, I laugh a lot.  So do Fiona and David.  And, when we’re together we verge on gentle hysteria.  There was only one other table in the restaurant and two men sat chatting and eating.  They’d given us a cheery greeting when we sat down and they had chuckled enough with each other that we felt comfortable yucking it up as per usual.  Halfway through the meal Fiona and I were snorting about John vs Bob Denver (don’t bother) when one of the men said, “It can’t be that funny.”  Fiona looked at him and said, “No, it’s funnier,” which only made one of those tiny new potatoes threaten a nasal exit from my side of the table.  The two men laughed nearly as hard at Fiona’s answer.  They had a great dinner, thanks in part to us.

We pulled into the Stonehenge car park (imagine a gravelly expanse decorated with Stonehenge-iana) and I prepared for a quick walk around the place with David saying things like, “Don’t take a picture, they’ll think we’re tourists.”  Who, the Druids?  The busloads of other tourists?  But, Fiona picked up the free audio guide and an hour later we were all standing in front of the massive stones saying “Wow!  How cool was that?”

Our next stop was Salisbury Cathedral.  And, yes, it is beautiful.  Looking up you’re reminded of the Lacock Abbey and its monks and the Tithe Barn and it’s farmers and of all the hands that gave and worked to make it.  You see how the arches bend and bow like silent waves through the air and then the choir voices rise and it is almost too much as the sound laps over you until you feel the music fill your chest, crowding out everything but awe.  And, in the center of the apse, the new baptismal font.  Dark, lambent green and deep enough for full immersion, it is modern in its spareness.  Or is it?  It, too curves in on four sides like a cross, like the beams and the arches.  The surface of the water is absolutely still, black and reflective. You can see the cathedral in it.  It is so perfectly designed that the water flows continuously out of four graceful spouts into the cathedral’s stone floor.  Silver as mercury, as a safety pin, it pours down in a thin stream.  The foundation of Salisbury Cathedral is only four feet deep.  It is built on a flood plain, and I can feel the holy water returning to it, blessed beneath my feet.  In fact–and this is what kept me from having a total conversion experience (well, not much to convert, but I was never baptised and feel an occasional frisson of terror at the thought of spending eternity in God’s version of a bank queue)–the verger must check the water level daily.  He uses a long pole ending in a rather bedraggled sponge to dip through a specially made hole in the floor.  As long as the sponge comes up wet, all is well.  So, I was pulled from the brink not by a hook but a sponge pole.  Along the walls of the cathedral are stone crypts, their lids effigies of their residents.  Nothing makes me happier that when I see a knight and his lady side by side in death as in life, their pointy little chain-mailed feet and gloved hands draped gracefully together.  I grabbed David’s and Fiona’s hands in an unconscious echo.

Right, that’s Salisbury Cathedral, then.  We went on to see one of only four copies of the Magna Carta, to which all democracies owe a great debt, the Salisbury Plain and all the ghosts of battles past that roam its rolling green, and sheep, lots and lots of sheep.  But here’s what kept whispering through me:  from the ancients who hauled the massive stones into place to mark the seasons (or the hours, or their gods), to the monks in silent devotion as they paced their cloisters, to the farmers who gave of their wheat to keep the Abbey, to the stonemasons who built the great cathedral, to David and Fiona who swept me off to see Wiltshire because I’m writing something that may become something or may not but, damn it, should at least be accurate in its settings, they all had faith.  Each one of the named and nameless have faith that what they do should be done.

Along the font in the cathedral are four lines from the baptism service.  One is “I have called you by name, you are mine.”  Somehow, all of us are called to do this thing that makes and remakes our world.    We continue to do this thing, or that one, because we must.  We must continue.   Just as the arches bend to each other, the one ending at the next’s beginning, one kind of faith gives rise to another.  Or, put another way, its all just one big faith that the world will keep spinning, that, yes, it is funnier or more beautiful or more beloved and brighter and better than you can ever imagine.  And why not?  Why not celebrate it?  All of it.