I wrote this in mid-2025 for submission to a Catholic anthology about pilgrimages. (It wasn't selected for inclusion.) Pilgrimages can be internal or external, long or short. The modern heroine in this story doesn't even know she's on one. But she figures things out. :)
SEPTEMBER 2025
The first time I visited Mission Nombre de Dios I almost ended up in the hospital. As I reached to open the door of the mission’s national shrine—the Our Lady of La Leche chapel—I didn’t pay attention to what was in front of me. Instead, I gaped up at the statue of St. Peter that stands in the niche above the chapel doorway.
When I started pulling open the wooden door, someone on the other side pushed it. I stumbled backward at the sudden lack of expected resistance. Then lost more of my footing when I faced an equally surprised, bearded man who wore torso armor over a puff-shouldered tunic. My shocked glance registered his black leggings, long cape, ruff collar and curved-peak metal helmet.
He wobbled in the doorway, hopped over the walkway’s low stone edging and thrust his sword in the grass to regain his balance.
What in the world?
My balance failed when my foot reached the same stone edging. I tilted backward and reached for something to grab in hopes of steadying myself. I went down with a thump, but not before seizing the only object within reach. Later, I learned it was an illegally placed wreath woven of sharp-edged holly sprigs and perched against a lightweight black easel adorned with grey ribbons.
The easel went down with me. The pointed holly leaves pierced my hand before I automatically let go. Everything after that was a blur. The conquistador had me up and on my feet within seconds. Blood covered my fingers and ran down my arm. Someone wrapped a t-shirt around my hand. People gathered and babbled and advised and called 911. Someone shouted that I should go to the hospital. Someone else started praying the rosary.
The only other thing I recognized was the voice of my sister, Clare, calling me as she came running from the shrine’s gift shop.
The crowds thinned after the EMTs determined nothing was embedded in my skin and that stitches weren’t needed. The medics cleaned and bandaged my hand and they, too, departed.
“My word, Lydia, it’s like you encountered a modern crown of thorns,” my sister said as we collapsed onto a nearby bench.
“No, more like stepping into a Flannery O’Connor story,” I grumbled.
“You just proved my point,” she said.
I didn’t want to hear it. I was in St. Augustine at her behest and wasn’t completely on board with the “vacation,” as Clare called it. Florida was too hot and touristy. But she was correct that I needed a change, one meant to help me discern the direction of my unmoored life. Women my age aren’t supposed to be living unmoored lives. I certainly never expected to be.
“What’s up with that conquistador guy?” I asked. “Halloween isn’t until next month and he’s a little old for it anyway.”
“Oh, no, no, he’s part of this weekend’s reenactment,” Clare said. “They’re rehearsing today. Every year, St. Augustine celebrates the day Menéndez stepped ashore in 1565 and founded the city. That’s one reason I hoped you could visit now. It’s a fun day with a landing reenactment, processions, a Mass, an outdoor meal and other stuff.”
“You could have warned me. For a few seconds I thought I was time traveling.”
“And ruin the surprise?! Well, never mind, I’m just glad you’re here. Although I still wish you’d stay with me, Ralph and the kids instead of at the Inn.”
As my breathing settled into its normal rhythm, I thought about why I had sought Our Lady of La Leche chapel to begin with. I hadn’t told Clare yet. Soon as I mentioned the chapel to her, she’d assumed I wanted to pray for guidance and had whisked me to the bayside mission. I didn’t tell her I’d given up waiting for God to whisper truth about my life. But praying for others? That I could still do.
Clare is 10 years younger than me. Her life is a painful reminder of what mine used to be. Her three children are still in school, two in high school and one in the local college. Her husband is a big-tech engineer on assignment at a local facility. The whole family volunteers with the city’s archaeology program and is active at church. “First parish in what is now the United States!” she chattered to me over the phone soon after they moved to the city.
“How are the kids?” Clare’s question jostled me back into the present. I’d been close to resenting—again—how my life no longer unfolded the way hers still did. She was content. My inner wounds were raw.
“They’re…doing okay,” I said, without elaborating about my daughter, Hannah. “Both independent. I’m proud of them.”
My daughter and son had launched their adult lives within months of each other—one to marriage and traveling with her military husband to his postings, the other to a tech job he worked remotely from Prague.
My dear, dear husband had died of a ruptured aneurysm two years earlier. When the kids moved out, memories of Vincent barreled into my empty nest with renewed vigor. I remembered our love, our marriage, family life, retirement dreams, our wish to grow old together, the shock of his sudden death. Gone, in an instant.
My parents had already passed. My friends could only do so much. Clare lived several states away. God seemed further away.
I channeled my grief into my own remote job. Until I was downsized.
Then Hannah called from Japan where her husband is stationed. Through tears, she confided she was having trouble conceiving. I could feel her distress across the miles.
“This isn’t the way things are supposed to happen,” she wailed.
My heart stung with her pain. I listened and consoled and, later, prayed.
And that’s why I had been heading into Our Lady of La Leche chapel this sunny day in Florida. Women have prayed at the shrine location for fertility, safe childbirth and other feminine cares for more than 400 years.
“I’m going back to the chapel,” I told Clare and got up from the bench. “You know Hannah is having trouble getting pregnant.”
“God’s will be done,” my sister said.
I bit my lip to stifle a sarcastic reply. Clare means well and means what she says.
We walked the short grassy distance to the now-quiet chapel. Ivy shaded its stone façade and contrasted with the bold azure of the sky and bright stone of the walkway. A sense of welcome, of camaraderie, hovered.
“Lydia, look, that hideous wreath is gone.” Clare pointed to the now-vacant space adjacent to the door. Not a sharp-edged leaf or shred of ribbon remained.
Inside, earthy tones and dim lighting conveyed coolness and repose. Narrow, arched, recessed windows enhanced the intimacy of the small space. A handful of pews lined each side of a center aisle that led to an altar and statue of Our Lady of La Leche holding the Christ Child. I felt wrapped in the love of generations. But I didn’t feel any closer to God, even after I dropped to my knees and pulled from the deepest part of my soul the most heartfelt prayers I could utter.
----
Early the next morning, I savored a coffee and croissant in the shady courtyard of the St. Francis Inn. Who knew September could be so hot? It felt like high summer. My weather app told me temperatures back home were expected to dip into the 40s overnight.
My phone buzzed and my sister’s name popped up on it.
“No, I didn’t see any ghosts in my room,” I said by way of greeting. The St. Francis Inn is the city’s oldest inn and famously said to be haunted. It’s quaint, homey and just my style. But I didn’t encounter any of the spectral beings half the city’s residents claim reside there.
“That’s not why I’m calling!” Clare exclaimed. “Someone took a video of you and it’s all over the internet and local news. And guess what? That wreath, the one that tore up your hand? It was placed there by the Satanists. You know, that group that pretends it’s a church. They were ‘celebrating the decline of religion,’ their spokesperson said when two members were arrested. Yes, arrested. I watched the recap on the news. The Satanists decided their free speech was being muzzled after they were denied a permit to stage an exhibit at the chapel. So, they put up that awful spiky wreath anyway!”
“At a national shrine?” I interrupted.
“Nobody can just set up an exhibit at a national shrine.”
Something inside me bubbled up. Apparently even a restful chapel wrapped in love for women wasn’t off-limits for malcontents feeding on publicity. I wanted to jump back on a plane and return home, where the open spaces and wind on the plains blows away problems.
But no, I’d just gotten here. I was here for a reason. And the only thing those winds had blown away in recent years were my life’s anchors.
On the other hand, I hadn’t reckoned on going viral. The night before, I’d been exhausted. My hand throbbed and I had begged off from dinner at my sister’s house. I went to bed early without checking the news or social media.
Another call buzzed. My daughter. “I’ll call you back, sis,” I said and took Hannah’s call. It was followed by a text from my son. I was news even in Japan and Prague. Then a publicity person from the St. Augustine tourism office phoned and asked me to be a special guest at the weekend’s festivities. My near-collision with the conquistador—the focus of the viral video—had generated a lot of interest and more than a few memes.
“Thank you, thank you, so many people forget Spain governed Florida for two hundred years before the United States was even an idea,” the publicist gushed. “We could never have paid for this level of attention!”
“Um, what would I have to do?”
“Oh, not much, just gather with us at the reenactment site and be in the photos and maybe sign a few autographs. You could walk up and shake Menéndez’s hand when he gets out of the boat and steps on land. But let him kiss the cross first. That’s an important part of the reenactment. But you greeting him would make great visuals. You’re famous, you know!”
I tried to view it as an opportunity to do something out of the norm for me. “Well…okay.”
“Great!” she chirped. “See you at 9 tomorrow morning at the mission. The landing takes place at 10.”
The phone went blessedly silent. I relaxed again and drank in the tranquil surroundings. Nothing fancy, just a mishmash of tables and chairs, worn brick pavers with moss growing in the gaps, a tangle of plumbago, passionvine and coral honeysuckle plants, a few palm trees and a gnarled oak with Spanish moss draped from its massive limbs.
It was nice enough for a walk, so I strolled down to the bay and around a few blocks. My sister had been right. St. Augustine is even more of a gem once you look beyond the tourist sites. On one narrow street lined with old coquina-and-wood houses, the overhanging second-floor porches almost kissed in the air above me.
The city history I’d read about in the Inn’s pamphlets seemed real. I tried to imagine 16th century Spaniards interacting with Timucuans, and Franciscan friars translating the Bible into the local language. Those same friars siding with indigenous residents when soldiers overstepped their bounds. Settlers far from home, waiting months for letters to cross the sea. Laborers, military wives, the enslaved and indentured servants trying to carve lives in a strange wilderness. Mothers praying for safe childbirth.
I savored the salty scent carried across the bay by the light breeze. My thoughts circled back to women who have prayed for centuries for Our Lady of La Leche’s intercessions.
I felt an urge to revisit the chapel, so I texted my sister to let her know my whereabouts and hailed a ride-share.
The chapel was quiet when I entered. I was the only one there. I pushed aside my own needs and focused on my daughter’s. My own pregnancies had been so easy. Yet so many women today faced infertility. It was one more anguish in an already disordered world.
Despair invaded the serenity I sought. I finally just let the agony flow. Maybe that was God’s plan, to get me to fully acknowledge the depth of my pain.
I kneeled with head bowed, eyes closed and hands clenched. My thoughts swirled until I guided them into prayer and sank into contemplation.
The touch was slight. A sense of hands on my shoulders. Then it was gone. I stiffened, alert and aware, and whirled around. Nobody was there. My shoulders tingled, as though someone had fluttered by and left an almost imperceptible impression.
I eased back onto the pew and sat in astonishment. The inner pain wasn’t gone. I’d dredged it all to the surface. But my sense of carrying it alone was.
The mystical encounter stayed with me throughout the day. Through the guided tour courtesy of my sister and brother-in-law, who’d taken time off from work. Through the massive Castillo de San Marcos National Monument (more interesting than I expected), the Gilded Age excesses embedded in Henry Flagler’s luxury hotel-turned-college, historic Tolomato Cemetery and a few other places.
I could have slept at the table by the time we and their children dined at Columbia Restaurant. But the food was too good and the company too important. The streetside ambience made the setting memorable. The trickle of a fountain’s flow echoed off the courtyard’s coquina walls and the heady scent of night-blooming jasmine floated in the air.
Later that night, though, was a different story.
I was tired yet restless and my hand ached. A party elsewhere at the Inn drowned any chance of quietude. I was still wide awake when the revelers settled down just before midnight. My ground-floor room had an exterior entrance, so I gave up on sleep and slipped outside.
The moon cast a pale glow over the courtyard, giving it a shadowy but peaceful aura. I walked around the small square and let the centuries baked into the site soak into me. I could almost feel the presence of the past and hear unseen footsteps from hundreds of years ago.
When I finally did fall asleep…maybe I wasn’t asleep…well, I have no idea, really. I sat upright in bed at the sound of wood creaking. There, in an oak rocking chair near the end of my bed, sat a small nun in full traditional garb: floor-length black tunic, long veil, white bandeau and wimple, short cape, cincture with rosary beads attached.
Something about her wasn’t fully corporeal. My heartbeat ratcheted. “Who are you?” I whispered. “Are you real? Am I dreaming? Am I awake or half asleep or what?”
She nodded in a way that indicated encouragement or approval. Which didn’t answer any of my questions. She didn’t speak.
I looked at my watch. 3:07 a.m. Looked up again. She was still there. Sill with that Mona Lisa smile. Her benevolent aura did little to settle my nerves. Was she the source of those mystical hands I’d felt while praying at the chapel? I wasn’t ready for this.
I squeezed my eyes shut and ordered myself to be rational. The dinner meal had been heavy, and I’d overeaten. Maybe I was taking too much acetaminophen for my hand. Touring had made for a long, exhaustive day. I wasn’t used to the heat. I was overtired. I was…
The chair creaked again. I opened my eyes. The nun was gone. It was 3:14 a.m. I was more awake than I’d been at midnight. The festivities were due to start in a matter of hours and I had to be at the mission by 9 a.m. I needed sleep.
I dug in my purse for my rosary. Yes, it’s always there although I haven’t been the best in my faith practices lately. By the Hail Holy Queen, I felt settled again. The next thing I knew, it was 7 a.m. and my phone alarm was chiming.
The mission grounds were packed as though for a concert or parade. I never imagined so many people would gather to watch costumed men row a small boat across a bay’s tributary and step ashore. I had second, third and fourth thoughts. But the publicist found me before I could escape back to the Inn.
I almost asked how she’d found me in the crowd. Almost. I’d only watched the video once. It had been more than enough.
“Hello! Hello!” She was the perpetually cheerful type. “Come, we’ll go stand with the others.” The others consisted of costumed men, women and children, some in reproduction 16th century Spanish and frontier garb, others in indigenous attire. The round-peak helmets must have been the height of military fashion in the 1560s. Some people carried flags, others had drums. I recognized muskets because I’d seen them at a museum.
“Hey, there she is!” Strangers pointed and talked about and to me. Some asked for autographs. Crowds clustered around me. Questions flew about what I’d do now and how did it feel to be an influencer and did I know the conquistador and did we plan the video.
Influencer? Me? I glimpsed my sister and her family, who’d worked their way through the people to get near me. Clare gave me a thumbs up and filmed my encounters with fans.
Lord, have mercy on me.
The boom of cannons shocked everyone into redirecting their attention.
“Look, over there!” someone shouted. I stared in the same direction as everyone else and saw a small wooden rowboat. The man portraying Adelantado Pedro Menéndez de Avilés stood in the bow, proud and regal. Two men rowed and two others appeared to be part of the leader’s inner circle. More cannons on land boomed.
Everyone’s phones were thankfully now aimed at the boat, not me. The costumed entourage on land marched to meet the newcomers. A priest led the way, carrying a large cross that towered above him. The boat docked, Menéndez stepped ashore, knelt in front of the priest and kissed the cross. People clapped, shouted and cheered. Then Menéndez kissed the ground, straightened and proclaimed St. Augustine under the protection of God and king.
“Now go!” the publicist pushed me forward as Menéndez finished his speech. “Just say welcome or something like that.”
Speaking had not been part of the invitation. I was sure of that. But I’d already been re-noticed—why, oh why, had I chosen to wear a yellow blouse and yellow-and-green flowered maxi skirt? As I stepped forward, I saw phones swivel toward me like bees to blooms.
Menéndez accepted my improvised welcome as though meeting a 21st century woman was routine during Spain’s Golden Age. He bowed deeply and kissed my non-bandaged hand.
I stood awkwardly. What next?
From behind him stepped my conquistador friend. He suppressed a grin but I was close enough to see the glimmer of it on his face. Menéndez moved away and mingled with the other reenactors as they retreated across the grounds. The conquistador offered me his arm and steered me toward the official group’s procession.
People now started cheering for us. I had a sinking feeling another video would soon make the rounds.
“I think this is a go-with-the-flow situation,” he said.
“Yeah, except I wish it would flow away from me,” I replied.
More than half the spectators drifted off when the procession moved toward an altar for the open-air Mass that was next on the program. The conquistador rejoined his group and I found my sister and her family. After Mass, the reenactors and crowds headed for the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, where the day’s next activities were scheduled.
Not me. I’d had enough. I waved farewell to my conquistador friend—his name was Daniel—and told my sister I’d catch up with the family in a short while. As the mission grounds emptied, I slipped back inside the chapel.
This time, a prayerful serenity enveloped me at once. It lasted even after I couldn’t resist clicking on my sister’s text and viewing the video she’d found—already on TikTok—of me and the conquistador strolling arm in arm.
“Is this Love?!?!” screamed the influencer, who’d added hearts, happy faces and question mark emojis to the clip. “I say YES! What do YOU think? Let me know in the comments!!!”
I powered off my phone and turned quickly and gratefully back to prayer. When I rose to leave, a ray of shifting sunlight streamed through a window and bathed the statue of Our Lady in a momentary radiance.
Tranquility accompanied me when I exited into the bright day. Sunshine glinted off the mission’s 200-foot steel Great Cross at the waterfront. I still didn’t have answers to my questions. But for some reason that was okay.
“Oh, good, we were hoping you were still here!” A neatly dressed youngish man and two youngish women walked hurriedly up to me. They stopped and stood firm-footed where the dark, dangerous wreath had been only two days before.
“We’re planning a documentary on Florida shrines, kind of a Florida pilgrimage trail,” the man said after handing me his phone. He urged me to scan the QR code to get his and his partners’ contact information and check their YouTube channel for an idea of their style.
“You’d be a great host,” he continued. “Everybody knows you now and you come across well on video. You have a certain gravitas that’s fitting for the subject. It’s like you already have pilgrimage creds.”
“Because I fell down in front of the chapel?” I was incredulous.
“Uh, yeah, it shows you’re not a fake,” he said.
“We can’t pay much, but we’d share a cut of the royalties,” one of the women said. “Yes, we’re dreaming big.”
“We want to start in north Florida and then branch out to other parts of the state,” the other woman said. “There’s a small Lourdes Grotto replica at St. Anne Shrine near Lake Wales. And a medieval monastery from Spain that was disassembled and rebuilt in Miami. And so many other places.”
My first instinct was to refuse, but something stopped me. Why not, I thought.
I looked at their three hopeful faces.
“I’m interested in learning more,” I said. “And my schedule just so happens to be open.”
I glanced up at the chapel’s exterior statue. For a few seconds I imagined St. Peter wore the same smile as had my ethereal friend of the night before.
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