A quote: “New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.” ~~ James Agate
I’ll start with a story …
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It had snowed sometime overnight. I bundled up and took my first cup of coffee onto the front porch as dawn pinked the sky. There was a certain fragility, as if the earth was holding its breath.
I was in town at Christmas. A good year for celebrating. Good crops, good trade, more babies born and thriving. My own kids with my grands were happy to have me bed down with them for the week and, I confess, I loved the happy chaos and hugs.
But home is where I welcome the new year and the expanse of pristine white spoke to me like of blank sheet of paper waiting for me to write whatever story I wanted.
I glanced down the hill; I could tell what families were awake with me by the wisps of curling smoke from chimneys. So many more homes and they are closer together than what we used to allow in Liberty towns. One of my nagging worries.
First things first. Shortly most families would be up to start the day and a good number of them would be here by and by.
I crossed the yard, delighting in crunch underfoot, to the chapel. Inside I paused to see the inside flooded with sunlight and I held onto the peace that filled me.
I prayed for a year of more good stories.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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.featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Cameron says: The name of the town was Rayne and it was started by a couple of men with a lot of money who wanted to bring back safer towns. To the journalists that reported on us, we were a 1950s dystopian hellscape where women had no rights, blacks were hanged after sundown and our children were inbred and only studied the Bible. That came to an end when one of our town founders sat down with a vicious team of lawyers and dared the press to repeat their lies.
We’re pretty straightforward in our approach. Families were supported by the community, one income households were encouraged and the children were home schooled by various people in town. The worst crime we have is the occasional drunk and folks from outside causing issues.
When the town was purchased, the one-story church was in decent shape. What was fascinating was that the last preacher left extensive notes on “how to raise a Godly community” that covered everything we were going to do anyways.
This is why every New Year, an early morning service was held at the church. To let the people from before know that we were going to keep things going.
When the Kitties scruffed the whole Middle East in response to the terrorist attack that killed the regional governor’s kittens, we had no idea what to expect when we arrived on habitable world of a distant star system we were assigned to help settle. Would we be treated like slaves on a plantation in the antebellum South, or prisoners in a labor camp in the former USSR?
We shouldn’t have been so afraid, not when we’re dealing with cats. There’d be some restrictions, particularly related to possession of weapons and certain kinds of communication systems, but otherwise we were free to claim land for homesteading, to establish businesses, and generally run our own lives. Not to mention that the Kitties needed strong industrialized systems, not downtrodden serfs, to help fight against the xenocidal Tchiador.
And the Kitties left us free to worship as our consciences directed us. Unsurprising, given that they were for the most part deists, although there was a residual bit of sun-worship in the basking-benches of their holy places, and their kittens often acted as if such figures as the Sender of Prey were actual Persons rather than metaphors.
So houses of worship soon were going up in every city and town to which we’d been sent. At first our faith communities pretty much minded our own business, just glad that we would not be forcibly converted to the Kitties’ faith and made to prostrate ourselves to the rays of our new home’s primary in honor of the Beneficent Sun.
But as time went by, we began to notice that one faith tradition wasn’t getting with the program. At first the incidents could be written off as accidents, carelessness with dangerous chemicals. But after a vehicle depot “just happened” to blow up, it became obvious that they were still up to their old tricks. And we didn’t want to get blamed along with them.
I wasn’t personally involved, but I know several guys who were. They took care of things quick and quiet, making clear that either the Ummah policed its own crazies, or there wouldn’t be any mosques on this world any more.
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