Shrewsbury

I never finished telling you about our trip to England. So here it is, my last installment, and the topic is Shrewsbury, a wonderful little Tudor town full of topsy-turvy timber-framed buildings, some black-and-white striped, some yellow-and-white striped. We were there on Thanksgiving, a frigid, windy day, and I was wearing a terrible outfit (jeans under a skirt) just to try to keep warm.

First we stopped at Shrewsbury Castle—a red sandstone dream. There was a tower with leaded windows, and wisteria was trained against a wall around a heavy, studded door. The castle was red and made even redder by the setting sun. We took pictures and walked around the lush rhododendron gardens, saying, “Neat!” over and over again. I’d seen the place before, you know, long ago, in The Tasha Tudor Book of Fairytales.

I was feeling really worn out and sad in Shrewsbury, and a lot of times that day I was secretly crying, wiping my eyes covertly, averting my face. I cried when we came upon the ruins of Old St. Chad’s, a church that had “spectacularly collapsed” (our guidebook said) in the 1700s. Only the Lady Chapel remained—red sandstone and quite small, surrounded by flat, mossy gravestones that were slowly sinking into the boggy ground. There were signs showing engravings of the church before its collapse and in the state of collapse. And the collapse struck me as so tragic that I stood there crying again. And Rob said, exasperated, “It happened 300 years ago! Why are you crying?”

I cried in the gardens around Shrewsbury Abbey, too. They were so beautiful. There were azaleas and huge clumps of rhododendron. Fragments of old buildings added decoration to the beds. There were stone flowers and chunks of old columns, a stone arm and an angel wing. We strolled in the freezing semi-darkness along the River Teme, and then we sat and admired a grand old stone bridge. And I guess I was sad because modern people no longer include stone angels and flowers on their buildings. Because beauty is given so little consideration. Because American cities are so ugly—barren moonscapes, with so many parking lots.