Something about the Future

A tel dig occurs in the hills of Israel to prove, once and for all, where the city of Kiriath-Jearim actually was. Spades spade. Brushes brush. And through those stratified layers of dirt and clay rise broken shards of pottery that tell stories. And oh, how they talk. Not in large rhetoric of grandiloquence, but through negligible whispers and the most delicate sideway hem-haws. This shard here tells of a brother in love. This one of a wedding dowry delivered right in the nick of time. This one tells of reconciliation. This one of a happy birth. And, as one single, reserved archaeologist slowly fingers a shard over three thousand years old, that is when everything hits him. Now delicately wiping the desert dust from his eye, he thinks, there have been bodies before me who were not thinking of me. There have been glances exchanged over the flickering light of an oil lamp that I will never know.