walking in the medeval gardens at the clositers museum, Manahatten

walking in the medieval gardens at the cloisters museum, Manhattan / draft 2

fiction
edward w pritchard

this story is about a financial stock market trader living in 2012 who becomes aware he lived before in medieval Spain in the year 1115.

I walk in silence around and around the covered arcades in the perfect square walkways of the highest spot in Manhattan, at the cloisters museum. The smell of lavender wafts from the warm gardens as I stroll up and down the seven columns of each arcade, 4 walkways each with seven columns, each column capped with a Romanesque style ornamental capital high up along the Hudson River.

 Looking across the River I see new Jersey but as I walk my heart is always in Manhattan until I drift back to the Pyrenees in the cloister of St Michael de cloche in Northern Spain in the year 1115 which is where the cloisters museum garden where I now stand is modeled after. I know that because I feel in my bones that I lived at that original cloister in Spain as a monk in the year 1115.

I walk now in my present life here in Manhattan nearly everyday at lunch and sometimes after work to remember my past life and to think again of Justa a girl I once loved and was unable to marry. I entered the Monastery from Jaca, Spain  a medieval town to escape my life in 1114 and now in 2012 everyday at noon I walk around the walkways of the summer garden at the Cloisters medieval museum here in Manhattan in silence and think of Justa my love.

Sometimes a visitor here in 2012 at the cloisters museum in Manhattan will ask me a question about the gardens and I will politely tell them a little about the monastery where I once stayed for four years until my death in 1118. I am no longer bound in 2012 by my vows of silence as I once was as a monk at St Michael in 1115 and I enjoy telling the visitors and foreign tourists here in the present a little about the monastery and Northern Spain where I was born originally, long before my life here in New York.

The smells in the garden are what take me back to Jaca Spain in 1115. I quickly forget my job on the trading floor at JP Morgan and for exercise each day at lunch hour I walk round and round the four walkways of the gardens here at the cloisters and admire the Romanesque capitals on each column, some of which one hot Summer day in 1116 I helped repair after a small earth quake. Later back in 1116 I would often dust those exquisite monumental capitals as part of my daily duties when I wasn't praying. The work there at the monastery kept my mind off of Justa who was by the year 1116 married to a cloth weaver about two hundred miles from the Monastery I lived in.

Sometimes now in 2012 I stand in the garden among the flowers and lecture a little about life in the Monastery back in 1115. The tourists here in New York love my comments thinking me a part of the tour here at the Cloisters and the security guards don't mind thinking me merely one of Manhattan's many educated eccentrics. Also it helps that I am a rich patron of the museum and sometimes help raise money to expand the collections.

Justa, my love from Northern Spain  was very beautiful and I still miss her. Of course Justa has been dead and gone a very long time. I often wonder as I walk about the Cloisters in Manhattan what became of Justa and wonder if she ever lived again after her life there in Northern Spain so many many years ago.