Alas, poor Mercatrude

It seems only fitting that the patron saint of divorced people is not really a saint you would lay claim to, and probably not anyone you would want to hang around with. The early life of the royal Guntramnus, son of King Clotaire and Queen Clothildis, gave no indication that he would get religion in his later years. The story, as told by St. Gregory of Tours, generally considered reliable, is that Guntramnus divorced the fair Mercatrude. But within the year she became desperately ill and her physician was unable to cure her. So Guntramnus ordered his henchmen to murder the physician. Given the state of medicine in 6th century France, this seems a bit unfair. And the divorce business is unclear and confusing as well. Of course Guntramnus is not a saint for having killed his ex-wife’s quack doctor. No. After that he saw the error of his ways, converted and became a kind and tender ruler. His skull is kept in a silver reliquary in the church of Saint Marcellus, but I do not know where that it so it is unlikely I will be making a pilgrimage there any time soon.


On another note, CSB and I are trying to name our farm, which involves the hubris of calling it a farm in the first place.
CSB: How about Riverview Farm?
Me: That’s so generic.
CSB: It’s accurate.
Me: What do you think about C&C Ranch?
CSB points out that we are not in the west, have no cattle and no firearms. He prefers: Draper Homestead Farm
I say we are already next to a Draper Park. How Dew Drop Acres (homage à Nabokov)?
No comment.
What’s Time to the Hogs Farm, CSB suggests. I immediately concur and call his bluff.
And what is wrong with Let it Bee Farm? I ask.
Nothing.
Back to square one.
What about Mercatrude Farm, I ask, having just discovered the fair Mercatrude and not wanting to forget such a mellifluous name.
CSB: What does that mean?
Me: It’s the name of a long dead divorcée.
CSB: Next?
This is not an idle task. Naming matters. Ask Linnaeus if you don’t believe me.

Down for the holidays

Is there a weird medieval saint who woke up each morning in a panic? Or is that very panic what drove a girl to the convent and its rigid hours of prayer and silence?

All I know is that it’s the holiday season and I am falling fast into that state I refer to as holiday gloom. I attribute it to the sundered family and the fractured self. (And maybe just a little bit to the short days, the tinny muzak and the plastic Santa and his eight ungulates on our neighbor’s lawn inflating and deflating like clockwork.)

Is there a divorced person out there who genuinely looks forward to the cheer-infested shoals of the holiday season? Foolish optimism leads me to believe that there is, but I don’t know you. I don’t even know of your existence.
You’d have to be brain dead not to recognize that the unifying theme of all these end-of-the-year holidays is family togetherness. And for those of us who are divorced, that is exactly what is not. Even for those of us who divorced for all the right reasons and have gone on to make happy lives for ourselves, the holidays are when you doubt yourself. The holidays remind us of our failure to keep the family intact. Even if our expectations were unrealistic we still failed to meet them. Even halfway.

So, because it just might cheer me up, I will keep looking for the patron saint of depression. There are several patron saints of mental illness (Dymphna and Christina the Astonishing come to mind) but they tend to be possessed or have ecstatic leanings, or else they are practitioners of the arts of levitation and bilocation (think Drogo and Benedict Labre).

Photo by Andrew Or