“An English Girl”

“Annie was tall and thin, sprite-like, with short brown hair that flipped up beneath her ears, fine, delicate, English skin, and expressive lips that stretched, pursed, opened, and tightened to reveal a hundred different emotions of welcome, love, and joy. She was talkative, bird-twittery, flitting from branch to branch through the tree of life, gaily, like a six-year-old in her magic garden. As Skylar watched her, in any situation, even the most prosaic, he saw a pure form at play. For she exemplified the pure and gentle, tender and loving English maiden: a delightful creature who had existed for a thousand years. Annie could never be found in France or Germany or the United States. She was the product of this place with its bosoms of hillock, its riot of fertility, its ancient traditions and ways. She came from this soil and the land where families traced ancestors back 500 years and where the village-church cemetery and its time-faded stones unrolled across the land like a stemma unfurled, telling the graved stories of generation upon generation.”