The Last Green Valley

by Mark T. Sullivan

the aptly named Bug River

A Slavic word meaning 'pertaining to a (river) bend', derivatives include: in Russian búga 'low banks of a river overgrown with bushes', Polish bugaj 'bushes or woods in a river valley or on a steep river bank', and Latvian bauga 'marshy place by a river. This is just an ignorant quip that makes no sense when translated into another language, since the name of the river won’t be translated.

Technically, they were in Germany … until after the Potsdam conference in August that established the border at the Oder-Neisse line. I doubt Adeline and her kids would have considered Legnice, aka Liegnitiz as anything other than Germany as it had been pre-war.

Luke 2 doesn’t mention a donkey anywhere, so Will wouldn’t have been able to point to the story he’d just heard as evidence of donkeys at Jesus’s birth.