There Is/There Was

There is a spring on the high pass and legend tells that the men who carried the wine from the valley to the high plateau would stop here and replace the wine that they had drunk from the barrels with the crystal clear water that springs from the rock.

 

The drunkard’s spring.

 

There was a mermaid.

 

I know she was a mermaid because:

a)    She stayed in the water longer than I.

b)   She was singing softly in Spanish.

c)    She had a tail.

 

There is a spring that bubbles and steams from the earth, it’s too hot too touch but it falls down the mountain side through a series of pools.

 

There was a Pharmacy in the village, it sold everything for every ailment. It is no longer there, today the space is a shop that sells candles and woven items. There is nothing there that I need or want, there was nothing I wanted in the Pharmacy either, but sometimes I needed it.

 

There are secret places still, some people know of them so they might not be completely secret. Most of them lie hidden in the folds of the distant mountains and people don’t speak about them.

 

A secret is no longer a secret if you tell it to someone.

 

No one is talking about these things, they are talking about vaccines (or not), masks (or not) and health pass (or not).

 

So the secrets are safe.