A Fiction Prose Reflection, Book VI of XI

byChrisWhite – 2025

On the Series:
This series has journeyed through the eleven cardinal virtues: Hope, Charity, Prudence, Kindness, Faith, Love, Temperance, Fortitude, Wisdom, Patience, and Justice, through a synthesis of literary prose and poetry. Each reflection reaches into the marrow of human experience, drawing on both original verse and timeless lines from poets who gave voice to the sacred. This sixth installment contemplates Love, the profound force that binds and sustains.

IN WINCHESTER, TENNESSEE, a town quilted together by clapboard churches, dusty roads, and the long distant haze of mountain forests murmuring at its edges, an old cottage leaned ever so slightly into the slope of a hill, roses clawing up its flanks like the final ambition of summer. Margaret and Thomas lived there, not by accident but by long choosing the way rivers choose their beds and vine their stones.

The house, with its peeling green shutters and roof patched more by habit than by skill, was a thing kept alive not by paints, patches, or lumber, but by something quieter: a love so woven into the ordinary that it had become the fabric itself. To the stranger’s eye, theirs was a life undisturbed, a soft repetition of tea kettles whistling and rocking chairs creaking and dogs barking at the faraway crack of thunder.

Yet inside that slow world burned the stubborn fire of something real, something that no song, no novel, no clever vow whispered under chapel rafters could fully catch.

Every morning, Thomas rose before the light broke fully across the floorboards. He would boil the water just so, not rushing it, and place Margaret’s tea on the stand beside her bed. Sometimes she woke to find him already in the garden, kneeling among the tomatoes and the beans, his hands gnarled by time but tender still, as though each root and blossom might be some last fragile thing worth saving.

Margaret, for her part, sat often by the window, knitting as the wind rattled the panes. Her hands, too, remembered, though it was not only the grandchildren’s sweaters they conjured, but a lifetime of griefs patched together, stitches taken and lost, in the unspoken labor of devotion. They spoke little some days, sharing the kind of silence that belongs only to those who have endured the weight of each other’s sorrow without trying to fix it.

One evening, when autumn laid its long gold hand across the living room, Margaret spoke into the stillness.
“Do you remember when we met?” she asked, her voice barely louder than the fire popping in the black-iron stove.

Thomas chuckled low in his chest. “Remember? You were the only fool dancing in the rain that night. Mud on your shoes, wild in your eyes. I’d have followed you into a flood.”

“And you did,” she said, her face folding into a smile that was not about perfect teeth or combed hair anymore, but about recognition, something deeper. “You danced too.”

They laughed the way old people sometimes do, with their whole bodies, the sound careening through the room like a dozen whippoorwills in the night.

The world had tried, often, to break them apart, illnesses, lean years, the deaths of friends who had once filled the chairs by the hearth. There had been nights neither could find the words to reach the other, and mornings when forgiveness was not a feeling but a decision made silently, before the first coffee was poured.

And yet here they were: still choosing. Every day, choosing.

In the drift of that evening, Thomas opened an old book of poetry, its spine cracked and soft from decades of use. He read in a voice made gravelly by years:

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
—Pablo Neruda

Margaret closed her eyes, letting the old words fall into the spaces where memory lived.
“Love,” she whispered, “was never about avoiding the dark. It was about lighting a candle we both agreed to carry, even when the winds came.”

Thomas nodded, his face a landscape carved by patience and loss and the strange, undeserved mercies of time.

Later that week, Margaret found a fragment of Rilke tucked into a drawer, something Thomas had copied out in his careful hand when their first child was born:

“Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape…
the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees.”

They had done just that: walked and stumbled and knelt and gotten up again, always together, through the dark woods and the bright meadows alike.

The trouble with the modern world, Thomas sometimes thought, was that it mistook the sparks for the fire. Love wasn’t a grand flaring, a violin crescendo played for airport reunions and movie credits. It was the daily tending to coals that looked, from a distance, like nothing at all.

In a time addicted to spectacle, theirs was a quieter rebellion.

It was not fireworks.
It was not the kiss in the rain, or the scripted declarations under fairy lights.

It was the folding of laundry together on a gray Tuesday.
It was the hand on the back of the neck after bad news.
It was the unremarkable miracle of showing up.

It was, and still is, the invisible work of making a life not out of perfect moments, but out of broken ones mended tenderly, out of promises renewed without applause, out of knowing each other not just at their best but at their worst, and loving anyway.

“I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Some loves burn themselves out in the blaze of youth.
Theirs was the kind that smoldered… low, patient, faithful…, against the bitterest winds.

And if you listened closely, if you stood very still on that worn porch in Winchester some evening when the light slanted just right, you might hear it: not the clamor of something new, but the deep baritone hums of something that had learned how to last.