year, we journeyed together with the other Pilgrims of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. We examined despair and redemp- tion in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29.” We listened to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s traveler who stood before the ruins of the statue of the once powerful Ozymandias. We counted the exquisite ways that Elizabeth Barrett Browning expressed her love for Robert Browning. We drank deeply of Alexander Pope’s Pierian Spring. I was never the same again after that year. Ironically, while she taught me how words clothe thoughts and ideas, I never found the right ones to express my gratitude and appreciation for her contribution to my education. Like all other students in my class, I continued on my journey and left her behind after the end of that school year with only a back glance and a simple “thank you.” I know she did not mind. Because she knows that every time I read a poem or a book, she is there with me.
Our journeys continue.
v v v
Ruth Minerva G. Cruz manages The Quiet Place, a resort and spa in the midst of a vast sugar-cane farm in Bago City in Negros Occidental. She helps in the family’s Herbanext, which manufactures products based on the Ganoderma lucidum. She devotes much of her time running Lumen, the school for underprivileged children in Murcia set up in honor of her mother. She studied in Germany and speaks fluent German.
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