A Reply From the American People to President Pezeshkian of Iran

Dear President Pezeshkian, 

We are in receipt of your letter dated April 1st 2026, and we hasten to respond --- we are aware that this is the first time that Iran has engaged in a conflict outside its borders in over 200 years.  

We are aware that the present violence trespassing against Iran's sovereignty is against all international law.  

We are aware of the foreign - mostly-British meddling - in Iran's political affairs, because they have meddled in the same way in our political affairs. 

We objected to President Donald Trump's action at sea the moment we heard about it, and have made it clear that we do not consider the attack against Iran to be anything remotely associated with the defense of this country. 

The Monroe Doctrine was never validated nor ratified by the States of the Union and it still isn't anything we recognize as valid.   

We have told the international diplomatic envoys, banks, and trustees that we will not pay for this incursion against Iran; the Principals responsible for Mr. Trump and his actions will have to pick up the bill for it: Britain, Germany, and Israel have hired him to attack Iran and he accepted this sidebar contract with these foreign governments of his own free will.  

Our military has been used as a mercenary force without our consent and largely without the knowledge of the rank and file members of our military forces, either.    

The American Government has a defense services contract with the United States of America, Incorporated, the British Territorial governmental services corporation that Mr. Trump is "President" of, but that does not condone the violence, meddling, and bullying that is happening here in any way.

We are under contract to receive defense services only and only in actual defense of our country.  

We are doing everything within our power that we can to raise the conscience and consciousness of not only people in this country, but people throughout the world, who have witnessed the abuse of our Title IV Flag and assumed that "the Americans" were attacking and causing all this destruction. 

It's not the Americans.  It's the British Crown Corporation and its Territorial franchises "presuming" upon our Good Name and our delegated powers at sea, stipulated under The Constitution of the United States of America, and never intended to extend to extra-territorial acts of aggression against Iran or any other nation. 

We defined our Title IV wartime flag and gave them the use of it when exercising the delegated powers conferred under The Constitution of the United States of America, but they have been grossly and without authority extending the meaning and range of the powers delegated.  

They have been using our Title IV flag as a False Flag to cover illegal mercenary contracts funded by foreign governments.  

America is not at war with Iran.  The American people are not at war with the Iranian people. We wish only for peace and goodwill and respect among all nations. 

We have warned the international banks and trustees that we are not agreeing to pay for this mercenary conflict being mislabelled as a war.  The government franchise corporations that hired Mr. Trump to attack Iran need to pay for the costs and the reparations that will be owed to Iran and to the American people, too.  

In view of the illegality of all these actions and the long term abuse of our Title IV flag, it is our firm belief that the British Crown Corporation -- together with its franchises -- should be outlawed and dissolved as a transnational criminal enterprise.  

We are moving as quickly as possible to take back the administration of our public affairs which were formerly entrusted to federal subcontractors --- subcontractors who have acted in gross breach of trust and violation of their service contracts. 

We share your sadness and regret the loss of life and domestic infrastructure throughout Iran and throughout the Persian Gulf region.  We especially extend our sympathy to all the families of the little girls who were killed the first day of this attack when their school was targeted based on outdated information.  

Do not believe that this was anything America or the American people condoned. We feel your grief and we mourn with you, just as we mourn with the families of our own service members who have been killed for no good reason.  

Most sincerely,

Eric Belcher (Belle Cher) 

Hereditary Head of State

The United States of America

Unincorporated Federation of States

April 4th 2026

International Public Notice: Your Bicycle Has One Pedal

 By Anna Von Reitz

While everyone has been focused on "war" with Iran (another commercial mercenary conflict veiled as "war") and oil prices and banking --- we have been dissecting the global depopulation agenda and finally making headway. 

The depopulation agenda and the Death Cult that goes with it doesn't make sense until it is viewed through the lens of fear and competition, from the perspective of old European Powers suffering population collapse as a direct result of two centuries of shameless war profiteering and mindless blood-letting for profit. 

They are suffering population collapse, so they want everyone else to suffer population collapse, too.  They have been viewing the rest of the world as "overpopulated" -- relative to their own situation. 

We became aware of the hidden motivators only because we finally caught onto the Pushback being mounted by some elements of the British Government ---as those same elements have sought to save British lives and redefine social values in a way calculated to support life and love going forward. 

We have, in effect, a Death Cult, a Life Cult, and a bunch of "Gentlemen of Fortune" --- mercenaries --- all more or less rogue and rumbling things up.  We have chosen to turn the spotlight on this circumstance, because it is central to understanding how the world got into this position and how we can get out of it.  

The idea of overpopulation assumes that too many babies are being born, hence the rise of "legalized" abortion, devaluation and abuse of children, vaccine programs that shorten lifespan and increase disease rates (very profitable for the for-profit insurance and medical sectors) and decrease natural reproductive capacity, up to and including the whole Covid 19 atrocity. 

The fact of population collapse, on the other side, presumes that not enough children are being born within the native population of each country to sustain reasonable growth --- and this is what Western Europe has been attempting to deal with.  Millions of men killed in endless wars for profit leave behind millions of single women and fatherless children, which destroys any semblance of a sane or natural culture.  

It isn't that the Fathers haven't shown up.  It isn't that they suddenly turned into "deadbeat Dads".  It's that millions of men have quietly died in endless mercenary wars and the parties responsible for this have attempted to cover it up so that they don't catch the blame for it.  

Look at China's "One Child Rule" --- and the result: over a million men without mates anywhere in the Chinese population. 

This isn't "social engineering" -- this is pure self-interested cowardly political evil at its finest.  

It's bureaucratic butt covering at the expense of dealing with reality. 

And it is actually more complex than the numbers themselves profess, because in addition to all the men killed outright, there are all those that returned home suffering from mental, emotional, and physical damage that rendered them unable to cope and be the good fathers and pillars of society that are needed. 

Ground Zero: My Granddaughter married a man with Traumatic Brain Injury and struggled for fifteen years in the half-life of glorious moments of love and clarity interspersed with abject self-medication and violence and frustration.  She finally divorced him and is concentrating her efforts on raising his only child to be healthy and happy and whole --- it's the last and only thing that her love can do for him.  

Think about that.  Her child is a monument to a man who, in a sense, died a long time ago.  She takes what joy she can in seeing him reborn in her baby, but she's alone, a single parent, cast adrift in a culture so deluded by "money" that it has forgotten everything that actually matters. 

She cherishes her baby and guards her baby all the more, because that child is all that she could salvage and save of the man she loved, and everywhere you look, you see women living truncated lives of such endless loss and struggle fighting the same fight, because the men that should be beside them are gone or too damaged to be part of a family life. 

This is what we are all heir to because of two centuries of mindless war profiteering and money manipulation by a system of corporate patriarchy that doesn't deserve to be spit on. 

When we say we need a change, we aren't talking about a change from one political party to another, or one monetary system to another.  We mean a basic, fundamental, to-the-bone change in vision and values.  

We all need to stand on the side of life and on the side of love, and kick the corporate necromancers and money magicians straight back to Hell, where they belong.  

We need to know and tell everyone the Truth: 

Corporations aren't "persons", they are things -- inanimate, mindless, faceless things.  

And money is just a shell game, an intrinsically fraudulent commodity, a false belief on steroids.  Wake up. 

Is a piece of plastic candy corn worth your life?  Is a piece of shiny metal that you can't eat, can't drink, and which you ultimately don't need worth your life?  How about all these pieces of paper? 

This is your Dutch Grandma standing here telling you the truth, and if you look around and think about it, you will realize that what we are observing and playing back for you is true. 

You've been standing here looking at a Carnival of Lies and Errors your entire life, and you've been forced to participate in it, too.  

So what's the alternative?  

You run your own government and realize that nobody can do that for you.  

You issue your own assets and your own credit and manage your resources like "prudent men" --- not drunken sailors spending someone else's inheritance.  

You grow up and stand with your neighbors, instead of acting as a hired gun for the latest gang of political party reprobates. 

And most of all, you keep your eyes on what really matters, so that you are never again deluded about what is important and what is valuable.  

Issued by: 

Anna Maria Riezinger -- Fiduciary

The United States of America

In care of: Box 520994

Big Lake, Alaska 99652

April 4th 2026

------------------

See this article and over 5700 others on Anna's website here: www.annavonreitz.com

To support this work look for the Donate button on this website.

How do we use your donations?  Find out here.

It's Already Over

 By Anna Von Reitz

To all those secretly gathered in their little covens all over the world discussing how they have to remove me from leadership and how I have --- in one way or another --- become a liability or gone over the top or lost my mind.....

Can you stop an arrow that has already hit its mark?  Or steal from me what I already gave to all of you?   LOL! 

The good news is that we won.  Life won.  

The same groups are scurrying around trying to "control the money", but money is just a product, like ACME widgets, or Carter's socks. 

Any discussion about controlling money is as lop-sidedly insane as discussions about controlling guns.  Or post hole diggers. 

Money doesn't need to be controlled.  The people creating and distributing and hoarding and manipulating money to benefit themselves at everyone else's expense---- they are what needs to be controlled.  

The victims of money manipulators and a few well-armed gendarmes are what's called for, along with a total reset of our mental and emotional faculties and values. 

I am going to tell you upfront, that life is the greatest value.  If you don't have life, you don't have anything else.  

So start there and ask yourselves, how much time have you spent appreciating or taking care of your greatest asset? 

The only other value that can enter the same space as the value of life, is the value of love.  

And again, how much time and investment have you made in love? Do you think about it, in all its myriad forms?  Do you see how love makes life worthwhile?  Do you carefully, day after day, create more love and invest it wisely? 

If you aren't investing in life and love, then you have missed the whole Big Market Opportunity of a Lifetime,  and don't have a clue about what truly matters and is truly valuable.   

All the different forms of money are commodities like any other commodities that exist on Earth.  The difference between British Pounds and German Marks is the difference between Hershey's chocolate bars and Nestle's chocolate bars. 

Money is just another class of commodities that has been rigged and manipulated by Central Banks.  

Once you understand that Central Banks are licensed to rig commodities of all kinds and realize that money is a commodity, the rest of the story is obvious.  

You (and everyone else) have been duped, deluded, denigrated, defrauded and defamed by a bunch of sleazy con artists backed up by sleazy politicians, who have spent the last two hundred years on a rampage of war profiteering. 

Two hundred years of war profiteering has left Britain and Western Europe in population collapse.  

Not overpopulation -- population collapse.  

Yet what has the BBC been selling for the past forty years?  The dangers of overpopulation.  The need for population control.  

Follow along.  There is a method to this madness. 

The Europeans were suffering depopulation, so everyone else needed to be depopulated, too.  That's their reasoning. 

So the collapse of the native populations of Western Europe is what gave rise to the overpopulation smokescreen and the depopulation agenda.

The Europeans couldn't bear to have Asians and Africans and Chinese taking over the world, while they paid the price of two centuries of reckless squandering of life.  

The monarchies and churches and politicians responsible for the greatest population collapse in modern times, reframed the public discussion by 180 degrees, and barraged us night and day with fear-mongering about overpopulation, instead. 

Understandably, this causes cognitive dissonance. 

And provides a smokescreen for crooks in suits.  

Granna

------------------

See this article and over 5700 others on Anna's website here: www.annavonreitz.com

To support this work look for the Donate button on this website.

How do we use your donations?  Find out here.

Another Season Comes

 By Anna Von Reitz

The winter has ended and spring has come in just these last few days.  Uriah has once again come through with a cup of morning coffee for me.  The young British men who form the early morning crew have just left the premises, Justin Knight among them.  Bathsheba and I are left alone in the main salon, bathed by the clear morning light, lazy and warm for once. The odd "English chill", a unique combination of cold and wet,  that you must either learn to love or hate, is vanquished for the moment. 

I watched the queue of men departing and I spoke without turning my head toward Bathsheba: "Young lesser gentry being able to marry for love --- whose idea was that, yours or David's?" 

"Mine," Bathsheba admitted, "and then-Prince Charles." 

We let a long pause settle on that one, thinking about love and how unaccountable it is, how you can love two people at once, and how no love is ever the same. 

"I hope you will bring a Guest to the wedding," Bathsheba finally offered.  

"I don't think there's anyone out there for me," I replied honestly. "I was lucky enough to get a good one the first time around." 

"James was very special, but then, he'd have to be.  You wouldn't marry for title or fortune." 

"That was only fair, as I had neither."

"Remember when the fairy godmothers tried to set you up with Tom Harriman?" 

"Because we were both short and both liked to knit?" I quipped. 

"Because he was terribly rich and you were terribly poor," Bathsheba corrected. 

"Poverty has its merits.  You learn that you can survive without being rich, and so don't fear poverty anymore.  It sets you free in its own strange way." 

"Do you ever think of him?  Tom?" 

"Of course," I shifted my weight and glanced at her. "The ironies of age aren't lost on me. What if we'd taken a different course?  Right now, we could be sitting on opposite ends of a long fireplace, knitting sweaters for unicorns." 

She smiled in spite of herself. 

"With your genetics, you could last another forty years and be like the Queen Mother." Bathsheba observed--- but then, Bathsheba has always been practical to a fault.  

I knew what she meant.  Feisty and full of it to the end.  That's the expectation for someone from my peculiar Scottish lineage: naturally auburn hair, "eyes of an uncertain color, flecked with gold", pale but very durable skin....  And yes, I could face all those forty years alone.  

It's a daunting thought, but Bathsheba has sense enough to know that she can never gauge my heart.  I was built on a different scale than her, meant for different purposes.  She couldn't imagine forty years alone without a man to comfort and guide her. 

"I know you miss him terribly," she said softly. "Is there no one else?" 

"No, no one," I replied and I know I looked very earnest when I said it, because I was trying to make her understand something foreign to her own nature. "I was lucky enough to find one among the millions, and anyway, I have always been a wild colt, out running beneath the stars, content without a rider." 

This brought us both back to a night when we were on the Night Train to Glasgow and saw a young horse racing the train in a  pasture we were passing by, a leggy grey Hunter running for the sheer joy of running beneath the moon and stars. 

She nodded, for the moment discouraged. 

"Just because you can have your cake and eat it, too," I said gently enough, "Not everyone is as lucky as you.  Some of us don't get second chances." 

Sometimes, that's just the way it is, and we both knew it.  

"I'm happy for you and Uriah," I added. "Your storybook ending may have to be enough late-in-life satisfaction for me." 

"I started drinking the peppermint tea and taking the milk thistle and other herbs this morning," she confided. 

The herbs will dry up her milk, gradually, painlessly.  She will lose a cup size, maybe two, but not as much as you might think. She will still be large enough up top to get more than glances, but Uriah remains adamant and promised Mrs. Pam in front of God and everyone: "No knife will touch her breast, if I am alive and have anything to say about it."  

Coming from a veteran MI6, we all considered that to be a permanent settlement of the breast reduction surgery issue.  

"It's really not so easy to break a person's neck," Uriah once assured me. "Not like in the movies at all.  That's why hanging isn't such a good method of execution.  Most people end up strangling."  

"Jim much preferred a good strike to the Vagus nerve complex," I replied.  

Uriah gave me a knowing look and nodded. 

Strange things we know and strange things we've had to understand, I thought at the time.  How is it that mankind has developed a hundred thousand ways to kill each other, and not nearly as many ways to save a life? 

Chalk it up to the patriarchy again. 

Uriah drove me to the airport himself and lugged my one suitcase up the metal stairs from the tarmac.  He wasn't winded and didn't tilt over sideways the way you might expect from a man his age. He has retained his muscle mass and balance.  

As if to make a total break with the past, he hugged me again, very close and said, "You'll have to keep in better touch, now that you're officially my Best Man." 

I had a brief vision of myself in a formal suit, standing between the two of them at the altar, but it was too silly to contemplate. 

If anyone had any cause to wonder if my love for the British people is sincere, the words I have recorded here should give them no cause to doubt.  It's always been an odd and yet understanding love affair, lived on opposite sides of a fence, but in full view of the other.  

My objections and anger have instead been posed against the reckless elements of the deceitful and largely unaccountable British Government complex, the barking mad aspects of a "planned society" that placed political expediency and commercial advantage above common sense and honor.  

I suppose in the end, my life's work has been a battle cry against the unbridled patriarchy, running roughshod in its own blind self-interest.  

I settled back in my seat inwardly clucking about the cost of private jet service, but very grateful for its comforts.   

My thoughts paused briefly on young Justin Knight and his whole cadre of middlemen being prepared to carry on the fight for humanity.  Unavoidably, I had to think about King David, without whom none of this would be happening. 

In my mind's eye, I could easily remember his handsome face and the fast-moving kaleidoscope of emotions that passed over it almost as quickly as his thoughts. Like a Chess Master, he triangulated the patriarchy's every move, their Death Cult, his Life Cult. 

The rest of us didn't even know we had to choose a side.

Granna 

------------------

See this article and over 5700 others on Anna's website here: www.annavonreitz.com

To support this work look for the Donate button on this website.

How do we use your donations?  Find out here.

About the Uriah Articles

 By Anna Von Reitz

If you don't understand the journey you won't understand the destination.  Open your mind and take in the information and you will understand the depopulation agenda and everything attached to it from the push to legitimize abortion to Covid-19.  

If you haven't wondered, "Why would people be doing all these evil things?" or "How are all these disparate anti-life policies and programs connected?" or "Who is pushing this Death Cult crap and why?"  then you can afford to ignore these articles, but if you have been perplexed and searching through history and scientific publications and every other venue for answers, then this is it.  

I am literally sharing the process of discovery I went through.  

We are facing a worldwide struggle between directly opposed value systems --- those that cherish and value life (represented by matriarchy) versus those (represented by patriarchy) who promote death for profit. 

You will also get a sense of the use and misuse of science and bureaucracy, the multi-layered impacts that this struggle has had during our lifetimes, and some of the ways people have been pushing back to return to a moral and sane world that values life. 

This is the journey I took to gain the insight I now have into the clashing value systems that are literally at war with each other and which have used other issues, like religion and race and economic ideologies, as storefronts to hide the actual causes of war, destruction, and moral decay for centuries. 

I made it very clear that some people might be uncomfortable with some of this material but if you want to understand the motivations and fears and craziness that has gone on in this world, I know no better way to bring you along and allow you to grasp what we have been fighting —- than to follow the process of observation, discovery, and analysis. 

If people are too squeamish to see through the sexual aspects of this discovery and its implications, and don't understand that a life v death struggle necessarily involves sex — I don't know what to say to them.  

Having made this discovery and connection concerning these opposed hidden value systems, there is no going back.  

For many years we have struggled to define the problem in order to solve it.  We have endlessly studied and researched and at every turn, the pathway toward a solution turns inward, while the outer reaches of the problem expand. 

As I have wrestled endlessly with aspects of history, government, law, religion, and politics, I have long sensed that somewhere, somehow, it was all connected and that the fundamental conflict went far beyond any lesser struggles like rich v poor, black v white, republican v democrat, Catholic v Protestant.   There was always something larger, a misty, amorphous cloud of evil generating the dischord and poverty, illness and death.   

And now, if you patiently plod through the Uriah Articles and allow your mind and sensitivities to be assaulted, quite literally assaulted, you will know what that evil is.  

Believe me, in confronting this material, I have often felt like I was in a mental boxing match, taking punch after punch, seeing things I didn't want to see, having to slog through swamps full of moral ambiguities that nobody wants to slog through, being confronted, embarrassed, reduced, humbled, and in the end, upheld. 

There is a greater battlefield.  There is a Generative Source of all the horror and conflict and corruption.  

And there is a choice --- a relatively simple choice to make, once you clearly see what the choices are. 

So, if you are squeamish, are too embarrassed to read something that deals with mildly sexual topics -- yet topics that are important, if you are ever going to understand the cataclysms we are facing as a species, skip the Uriah Articles. 

Spend your days studying the storefront issues and limit your view of the battlefield to stay within your comfort zone.  I can tell you all honestly, that I have been pushed beyond my comfort zone to observe, discover, and analyze this material, much less write it down and take the responsibility of authorship.  

I have felt compelled to write it all down anyway, propelled by the suspicion that others have come to these conclusions long before, and let their own fear and their own sense of propriety dictate their silence --- leaving the real problem undefined and festering under the surface of lesser conflicts.  It's the things we refuse to see and talk about, out of fear and embarrassment, that continue to threaten us and leave us isolated, unable to organize a solution. 

Well, enough of that. 

I am a Great-Grandma.  There isn't much I haven't seen, done, smelled, touched, heard or felt.  I am not afraid.  Instead, I am humbled.  

Granna

If the Suit Fits....and Also, If It Doesn't

 By Anna Von Reitz

You must understand that I have lived most of my life in a shadow realm, and for most of it, I haven't known who I am.  I had relationships. I had a Mother and Father and pets and friends, all the normal happy accoutrements of life --- but in my early teens things started to depart from the normal world. 

If this makes your skin prickle a little, it should, because we are all in the same situation.  You don't really know who you are, either.  

People have told you who you are. 

They have given you a name and claim to belong to a particular family.  They presented you with an age, a race, a religion.  You have built up a history and formed a knowledge base, so that you have, over time, acquired an identity and accumulated evidence backing up your story line. 

But it is a storyline.  

Feel lucky if you have that distinctive chin or that nose or that wavy hair that identifies you, for sure, as a MacGregor or a Findley or a Pratt, Johnson, Lindhurst, or whatever other family....but none of that was true for me.  I was different from my cradle, endowed with different capacities and a different look all around, apart from anyone in my family.  

By the time I was thirteen, the long grinding process of discovering myself had begun. I was enlisted in a program. 

And now, I give you permission to let your skin crawl, because, well, being "in a program" has meaning.  

Young Justin Knight is in a program to teach men to be competent and hopefully, caring, husbands.  Bathsheba has been in a program to discover everything that can be known about breasts and breast milk and lactation. 

Once you are in a program other factors come into play, other purposes and meanings attach, you acquire a cadre, and you -- in one way or another -- enter the shadow realm. 

I call it the shadow realm because nothing is ever exactly the same as it appears, ever again.  Your own experience makes you view things as if you were looking at life through a prism or perhaps viewing its reflection through the pieces of a shattered mirror. The words "through a glass and darkly" come to life and you know exactly what the Apostle was talking about. 

A few of you have accused me of "writing a steamy romance novel" the past few days.  I can assure you that is not my intent and not the way I look at it.  

Is it romantic when two people you love have been kept apart, used and abused, for forty years ---- and are still paying the price of their parts in a dying social paradigm?  I'm sorry.  That doesn't count as romance to me.  

For me, and for them, for Uriah and Bathsheba, even for the Piper, it feels more like being on a torture rack for no reason and the circumstance of our lives as we have been forced to live them, has been imposed on us, quietly, steadily, almost imperceptibly by largely unseen forces.  

Was King David a fetisher, a madman, who abused his wife in a truly bizarre and despicable manner, or a hero who fought back using British history and the model of an older social paradigm to save lives and create new knowledge?  And what part does science and the "Mrs. Pams" of the world play in all of this?  Mere tools in subjection, or part of a ready infrastructure all too prone to manipulation for purposes both good and evil?  

And how do I judge that?  What is true is true, and yet, sometimes the truth alone seems to flicker like a candle, shedding insufficient light.  My friend, Bathsheba, would willingly walk across burning coals and would find the courage to do it, if it meant saving a baby's life.  I know that about her. I am absolutely sure of it. 

But would she consciously choose the life she has had, if the choice had been set straight in front of her from the first, and not been insidiously and slowly imposed on her?  

I don't know the answer to that. I only know that in the end result, she has accomplished more --- in a practical sense of having improved and directly saved more lives --- than I have. 

As for Uriah, was he a coward who failed to save her from such a fate, or a man who survived against the odds, and won through to be here at this time?  

I don't know the answer to that one, either -- I am just glad to the foundations of my soul that he made it, and that he's here now for her and they both have a late-life chance at happiness.

The shadow world has taken its toll on all of us, on James and I, too. 

James was sodomized so severely at a prison camp that his entire rectum had to be surgically reconstructed. It's a miracle he survived that physically, much less mentally and emotionally.  He was still a good man in spite of that horrific abuse and he still had love in his heart for humanity.  And for me.  He still managed to be a wonderful husband for me, and a beloved father for his children.  

How did I get my nickname, "Old Iron Pants"?  Because I killed fifteen men who were trying to do something similar to me. I killed them without a second thought, though I can still see their faces in my dreams.  

Because the fight is between life and death, sex unavoidably gets boiled up in it, and if you are too prudish to deal with it, you won't get far and won't survive well.  I am just telling you the way it is, as I always have, like a Dutch Grandma. 

Sex is meant to be sacred, but seldom is in this world.  It's meant to be private, sacred, and cherished between two people mated for life, knowing each other in all ways, loving each other in all ways.  That's what Justin's program is aiming for, to create men who value that ideal and who have the knowledge, skill, courage and acceptance to embody being a husband in real life.  And women who will match them as wives. 

It doesn't mean that Justin and his cohorts will all succeed, but at least the goal has been presented to them, and a pathway forward with skill development as a means to achieve the goal is being given to them. 

All I can say for them and their odd little consummation ritual that seems familiar to me, is God bless them and keep them, God raise his face upon them and grant them true peace and happiness. May they be like seeds to grow a new set of values and models to show the world what marital love and familial love could be. 

Because that is certainly one vital thing that this world needs --desperately -- to remember. 

As for the Piper, he has his own story, too.  He's a harlequin, and not really human, so things were a bit different for him --- slightly different issues of life and death, but nonetheless life and death issues.  

He lost his whole family.  He is the only one left.  No doctors can cure his illnesses.  Nobody can guess his age.  His origins are lost in star charts from the Age of Taurus. 

He remembers when people worshipped Hathor, the Egyptian cow goddess.  He attended ceremonies hosted by Roman Emperors devoted to Mithras.  He swears that I am the reincarnation of the Hindu goddess "Durga", the Great Mother, and that I am here to "settle accounts". 

I don't think he is talking about my work as a Fiduciary.  He means that I have a role in preserving life itself. 

Please notice that William of Normandy's Farewell Sonnet is relatively recent reading material for the Piper.  

I mentioned in passing that he picked me up like an infant and carried me, a stout grown woman, to the couch in his study --- even though he is "much older than me" and I am about to turn seventy. 

I also told you how much the Piper hates the cold.  He is leaving his house in Somerset because he is sick of Somerset's "cold and beastly climate" -- not because he expects to die soon. 

The Greek Isles, Venice, and the South of France are much more like his native habitats. 

And I don't even know if I will accept his gift.  Without Jim, I don't have much need for a large house.  Without Jim, I don't have much need for anything in this world. 

The truth is that I passed this marker many years ago, when Bathsheba and I were both young.  She had all the wealth in the world, the estates, the yachts, the country houses and I had nothing by comparison.  I was like an unaccountable flea on a dog and we were talking one afternoon. 

"I suppose I should be jealous," I said, and I really, logically, rationally meant that. I should have been jealous of her wealth and beauty and all her worldly possessions, but I wasn't.  I searched my heart and realized that I simply, inexplicably, wasn't jealous of her at all. 

Even I didn't know why at the time, but the fact remained that I couldn't raise the least little bit of a single twinge of jealousy. 

I already knew myself well enough to know that I was better suited to life on a farm or a beach bungalow, somewhere simple, with open skies and stars at night. 

I was and am a Country Mouse and I am content with that.

Yet Bathsheba and I could look at each other across the chasm of social classes and money and everything else, and still see each other's souls.  Being an American meant I didn't matter, though everyone always hoped I'd turn out to be the daughter of an American tycoon.  

At least, I could have the good grace to have a pile of money. 

That's what the Piper was bemoaning and muttering about nobody taking care of me, and regrets that James and I hadn't -- frankly -- been more successful financially.  The Piper is, of course, aware of the sacrifices we made for the cause of American Independence.  He knows why we were never able to become rich in our own right, but that doesn't change the fact of my non-existent bank balance. 

I think that accepting the house might be considered an "emolument" from -- if not a foreign government, a foreign source -- and would require an Act of Congress (one more pleasantly disposed toward me than the present one) for me to accept.  I am not an officer of the Federal Government, but am an officer of the Federation of States, and we may assume that the limits our Founders placed on their employees applied even more strictly to themselves and to us. 

Granna