✨Rough draft ✨
She was born where the river speaks in tongues and the moss holds secrets — a girl of the bayou,
part Creek Indian, part Scottish flame.
Raised under sunburnt skies
and thunder-washed prayers,
she carried two bloodlines
like a birthright and a burden.
From her Creek grandmother,
she learned to listen to the trees.
From her Celtic roots,
she learned to speak to the stars.
Even as a child, she knew she was different.
In her twenties, she met him —
a Moroccan cattle farmer living farther west.
A man with eyes like dusk
and hands calloused from work and worship.
She was a painter, a writer,
a wildflower with ink-stained fingers.
He was steady, a tender,
and mesmerized by her light.
People who saw them together felt it —
that kind of love. The rare kind.
The healing kind.
The healer and the cowboy.
That’s what they called them.
She with her long wild hair —
a little too mystical for the religious,
a little too wild for the tame.
Some called her a gypsy, some called her a witch.
But he only ever called her his.
And him — he was the rowdy one.
A rough and tough cattle man
with calloused hands and a quiet heart.
He drank too much on bad days,
but worked harder than any man they knew.
Everyone said she was good for him.
And she was.
But not because she tamed him —
because she saw through him.
They had gone downriver one summer -
In New Orleans… drawn to the cypress
and the stories the bayou kept quiet.
They talked to strangers about voodoo
and black magic, hauntings …
the secrets that curled in the Spanish moss.
And how water remembers what men forget.
They ate food they’d never eat again.
They danced in a saloon
where the air was thick with music and mischief.
A peddler passing through town, laid out his trinkets like treasure — bones, beads, bits of mystery.
There was a ring —
opal, soft and shining like rain caught in fire.
Blues and greens that flickered
like her eyes in moonlight.
He bought it without thinking.
Slipped it on her finger with a crooked smile.
She told him he shouldn't have spent so much,
but she never took it off again.
They wandered through cobblestone streets,
whiskey-warm and hand-in-hand,
listening to fiddles and stories in the starlit air.
It didn’t take long and then they were married.
But not in a church, and not in a hall.
They stood beside an old stump from a fallen tree,
candlelight flickering down a mossy path,
the bayou air thick with jasmine and fate.
She wore blush and lace and her favorite old leather boots. The sleeves of her dress slipped off her shoulders.
To him, she looked like a spell and a sunrise —
something ancient and untamed.
She was exotic… she was holy.
He wore his cowboy hat and his most comfortable jeans. The green shirt wasn’t his favorite —
but she once told him that green brought out
the one flake of gold in his brown eyes.
So he wore it. She thought he looked like every dream she ever dreamed.
She promised to always give him a hard time,
and all that implied.
He laughed.
Then he took her hands in his — rough and sure —
and promised to never hurt her.
Not with his fists, like her mama’s second husband.
Not with his absence, like her daddy did.
Not with his words, like all the others before him.
They didn’t cry.
They smiled like two people who’d just stumbled into destiny — because that’s exactly what they had done.
Their first trip together after the wedding was to the mountains.
They wanted something quiet, something free.
Just the two of them, two horses, and the wind.
And Lord, did she laugh.
It started when he didn’t tighten his saddle properly.
He went to mount the horse like a full-blooded cowboy — but the saddle slipped, and so did he.
Straight to the ground in a tangle of limbs and pride.
The look on his horse’s face —
wide-eyed and scandalized.
It was too much for her.
She doubled over laughing, clutching her ribs.
He groaned from the grass, but even he had to chuckle.
And that was before the ride had even started.
Her horse had too much giddyup for her taste,
but she giggled the entire time —
her wild hair flying,
her joy as loud as the mountain wind.
By the end of the day, her cheeks hurt from smiling.
Then came the rain — soft and sudden.
After a fast ride., they ducked into a crooked little tavern in a dusty mountain town,
where a man with dirty boots played piano in the corner, hoping for gold coin tips and a story to follow him home.
They nestled at a small wooden table in the back,
by the window, just to watch the rain.
He looked at her in the candlelight, with her cheeks still flushed from laughter, and he fell a little more in love.
He loved how the gray outside brought out the silver in her eyes. She loved how it brought out the gray in his beard.
It was “that” night.
The one they never spoke of but never forgot.
They had been invited — quietly, respectfully —
to sit beside the fire with a native family,
elders who carried stories in their bones
and wisdom older than the colonizers' maps.
They were offered tobacco and kindness.
The smoke curled in sacred spirals,
and the drumbeat was not music —
it was heartbeat.
A woman with braids like woven time looked at them both and said,
“You two… you are what the sky dreamed when it first kissed the earth.”
She explained that the union of man and woman was never just flesh — it was sacred.
A mirror of the Great Spirit’s own breath:
Mother Earth in her rooted glory,
Father Sky in his endless reach,
and the Spirit — the wisdom — the breath —
the one who dances between them and binds it all together.
“You are her echo,” she said,
nodding at the woman with the long wild hair.
“You carry the river and the fire.
And you…” — her eyes on the cowboy —
“You are the storm that protects, the thunder that yields.”
They didn’t fully understand it then,
but something inside them shifted.
Like the bones of the world had rearranged,
and their love was no longer just theirs.
That night, they didn’t speak much.
They lay beneath a canopy of stars,
wrapped in blankets and silence,
their fingers laced between them like vines.
And in the dark,
they knew.
They were part of something older.
Something holy.
In the early years, they traveled to Scotland —
her grandmother was dying, the veil thinning.
They stayed through autumn’s grief and inherited her grandmother’s home.
A stone cottage with ivy on its bones and stories in its beams.
The villagers called it a blessing; she called it a homecoming.
After the papers were signed and the hearth was lit,
she looked at him across the table and said,
“Well, Lord of the house… shall we begin again?”
He had laughed — deep and real — and bowed his head like a knight.
“Aye, Lady of the house,” he replied, eyes twinkling, “Lead the way.”
It became their thing —
The Lord and the Lady.
Not just in jest, but in soul.
They weren’t royalty,
but they ruled their little world with grace, grit, and love.
Neighbors caught them saying it to each other in passing —
quiet and playful,
but full of meaning.
He said it like a vow.
She said it like a blessing.
The village loved when they journeyed into town
each spring and fall.
She was a healer. A medicine woman.
A woman who knew plants and prayers.
A woman who saw.
The Celts, old as the earth, revered her.
They knew that myth was memory,
and geometry lived in the bones of the land.
She held both fires in her hands:
The Creek softness. The Celtic storm.
She was feisty, wise, rooted.
She did not shrink.
Not even after all she endured.
He had known many women — but never one like her.
And never one since her.
And so, one last fall, they returned to the old cottage.
This time for good.
The kids all moved to the cliffs as well.
As the years passed, their families grew.
And she never stopped needing the ocean wind on her cheeks, or the sound of hoofbeats over heathered hills.
Her favorite thing?
Riding horseback along the cliffs by the sea.
His favorite thing?
Watching her ride —
her hair silvered now, but her spirit unchanged.
And every time she looked back,
he was there, still on his horse,
just staring at her like he did when they first met.
She always smiled, because with him, she felt home.
She felt safe.
In their twilight years, he watched her with reverence.
Because he knew where she came from.
Who raised her — and who didn’t.
And still, she was never bitter.
She was the kindest mother.
The most loving lover.
When she laughed, he heard God in the sound.
She was the temple where he could be vulnerable.
She changed him.
Not with pressure, but feisty presence.
Her barefoot walk with God, Wisdom, Earth, and Sky
showed him how to believe again.
She was his mirror —
revealing both his shadow and his light.
She was the Mary to his Yeshua.
But on this day, as she rode across the cliff’s edge,
the wind pulling at her braid,
she turned and smiled at him, just like she always did.
And for a moment, time folded in on itself.
Because in that smile, he saw it.
He saw the first time he met her.
He’d been wounded — not by war, but by the wear of life.
A broken rib from a bull that didn’t take kindly to fencing.
The men in his village told him to walk it off,
but the pain was deep.
So he rode a day’s ride - a town over
to find a healer someone had whispered about —
“Bayou girl. Quiet eyes. Knows things.”
He didn’t expect her to be beautiful.
Didn’t expect her voice to sound like cedar smoke
and southern rain.
Didn’t expect her hands to touch him
like they remembered him from another life.
She tended to him without fear.
Ground herbs. Whispered prayers.
Sang when she thought he was asleep.
And when he left, still aching but lighter somehow,
he couldn’t get her out of his mind.
Weeks passed.
One cool morning, he took a trail ride near the Bayou.
The wind was gentle. The land, golden.
And there she was — on her horse, bareback and barefoot, her braid flying like a banner.
They both stopped.
Stared.
Laughed like they’d planned it all along.
They talked for hours that day.
Then again the next week.
And the next.
The conversations unfolded like old stories —
about God and horses, grief and colors,
books they’d never read but somehow knew.
And by the time he kissed her,
he was not the same man who had first walked into her Gypsy cottage.
Because he had been wounded long before the bull.
Wounded in ways no one saw —
by the religion of his father,
by the shouting of a world
that expected men to harden, not kneel.
He was raised among unhealed men,
led by those who only knew how to survive.
But she didn’t flinch at his shadows.
She didn’t try to silence his pain
with sweetness or seduce him into forgetting.
She faced it — with him.
She called out the darkness, and then lit a candle in it.
Not with pity.
But with fire.
She didn’t worship him.
She walked beside him.
She asked the kind of questions that only old souls remember to ask.
She gave him medicine from her garden,
but it was her presence that worked the miracle.
She had healed his body —
but more than that, she had healed his soul.
And now, here on this wind-cut cliff
so many years later,
as she turned
and smiled that same knowing smile…
he remembered all of it.
Something those warships on the horizon
could never take away.
That’s when he saw them… behind her.
Slowing into view. An entire fleet.
His immediate thought…
At all costs, protect her.
To be continued….