Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
Sean Dietrich 
The woman at the hostel utters four magic words. “Si, we have beds.” This is amazing. There have been no beds in Spain for Holy Week. It’s almost Easter Sunday and we have been beggars, compelled to walk the Camino de Santiago with our hats in hand, and our hands out, looking for beds.
I am sitting in a Spanish bar in the dusty pueblo of Villa de Larraga. This is evidently a locals bar. And I am definitely not a local. I believe I am the only Inglés speaker in this village tonight.
The stone doorway arch above us features carvings of angels and demons which date back to Roman times. Eight angels surround Christ, who is looking straight at me as though He is saying, “‘No room’ at the inn?—Now where have I heard THAT before?”
The 83-year-old woman has been opening her home to pilgrims since before I was born. Currently, she is bustling around her house, gathering fresh towels and soaps for us. We are standing in her doorway, drenched, cold, and looking about as content as wet Himalayan cats.
We leave our inn at daybreak. Our innkeeper is awake and already at the front door, wearing a robe, waiting to say goodbye to us. Like a mom seeing her kids off to school. She gives us a heartfelt and emotional goodbye in French, with double kisses and everything.
There are hundreds of pilgrims. Very few speak English. We are all from different countries, age groups, and walks of life. And yet, somehow, although we are foreigners sojourning in a strange land, we all manage to—this is beautiful—gripe about how slow the line moves.
The inn where we are staying is manned (womanned?) by two French women who speak no English and almost no Spanish.
Amazingly, spirituality is not a “weird” and awkward subject for the people of Madrid, it’s normalized. Here, people seem to treat the topic of religion as cordially as you’d discuss college football.
Today, my wife and I will become pilgrims. We will walk the breadth of Spain, upwards of 500 miles, over Pyrenees Mountains, on foot, to visit the remains of the apostle James.
There were ghosts everywhere. That’s what I kept thinking, while standing on Shiloh battlefield. Ghosts. You could feel them. You could almost hear their fraternal laughter. You could smell their gunpowder.
People from all over the world are traveling to this sacred place. Farmers and peasants. Lords and ladies. Rich and poor.
You slap the power button on TV. The old Zenith console warms up. The television is cased in a faux wooden cabinet, with warped oak-grain veneer from a bygone Dr. Pepper someone once placed atop the television, even though this someone’s mother told them to NEVER set ANYTHING atop the TV, not that we’re naming names here.
Sean gets lots of letters asking some pretty interesting questions. Herein, he answers some…in his own special way.
Today is a big deal.
If you don’t read any further, just keep repeating the above sentence in a loud, clear voice until it sinks in and your spouse begins to wonder whether you’re clinically insane.
I have always wanted to see the Chesapeake. My whole life, actually.
It all started because my dad was a reader. He read books obsessively. You’d see him sitting in his chair, poking through some thick volume.
Five years ago I was in Huntsville when the world shut down. Five years. Almost to the day. I’ll never forget it.
I remember my first cellphone. I felt like one bad hombre.
I was in my mid-20s. The cellphone retail salesperson outfitted me with a state-of-the-age phone about the size of a residential General Electric refrigerator.
The young woman sits in my truck passenger seat. She is 19. Her hair is red. Scottish red. Luminously red. People always comment on her hair first.
Her classroom was out of control. Had been for a while. The kids in her “at-risk” fourth-grade class were about as organized as a prison riot. That’s what we call them in today’s world. “At-risk youth.”
I have been doing a lot of walking. More walking than I’ve ever done in my life. More walking than I thought possible.