Lent Photo a Day: Celebrate

Today is Palm Sunday, part of the Christian celebration of Easter. On Palm Sunday, Jesus Christ was welcomed into Jerusalem, riding on the back of a humble donkey, cheered by thousands of people who covered the dusty road in palm branches and waved palm leaves in celebration. Today, Christians around the world will reenact this celebration by singing “Hosanna!” and waving palm branches.

To me, one of the most moving parts of any celebration, particularly any religious celebration, is a sense of unity. Even if you are alone, you are not alone in your celebration. Every celebration is, in some way, a celebration of community. Whether you are at home with your own family lighting Shabbat candles, or sitting in a steadily darkening Tenebrae service with a dozen other congregants, or in a temple full of hundreds of other worshippers raising your voices in a unison chant, there is an entire community celebrating with you. Somewhere in the world, there are other families lighting Shabbat candles, other congregations dimming the lights to celebrate Tenebrae, and other believers chanting the same ancient prayers. Even when you celebrate alone, you never celebrate alone.

Celebrate.

Lent Photo a Day: Beloved

I'm sick today, so I'm going to blatantly cheat on today's Lent Photo a Day. I'm not going to put together some big, involved, meaningful write-up. I'm not even going to take a new photo. I'm just going to state that today's word is "beloved," and that it, and the accompanying photo, is completely self-explanatory.

Beloved.

Photo A Day, Day 20: Egg

The first Easter that my husband and I were married, he dug out from the attic a big Rubbermaid tub of Easter decorations, which included a handful of dyed Easter eggs that he had made with his daughter over the years and carefully saved. A few have been broken in the intervening years, but I’m pretty certain that at least one or two in the collection are still from her childhood, over a decade ago.

And I have no doubt that in the coming years we will be adding more and more of the creations of our two younger children to the collection. This year, my 2-1/2 year old managed to participate for the first time, and did quite well at being gentle and not squashing the delicate shells nor spilling the dye all over the floor (well, not much, anyway). But my 4-1/2 year old really came into his own artistically this year.

Last year, as I recall, his most creative artistic endeavor was to dye an egg one color on one end and another color on the other end. Given his lack of patience at the time, the result was generally a white egg with a vaguely pink tint on one end and a vaguely green tint on the other. But one year has made all the difference. This year, he very patiently mixed colors to sponge-paint the eggs in just the right hue; he experimented with sponge-painting the eggs first, letting them dry, and then dying them in the “dipping” dye to fill in the blanks; he figured out how to hold the eggs carefully to avoid smudging his own artwork. In fact, he got a bit upset when he mishandled an egg and accidentally left a fingerprint.

But I will admit that this is my favorite egg from this year, specifically because of that fingerprint. Five, ten, twenty years from now (if the egg manages to survive that long), I will look at that small fingerprint and think of the small fingers that carefully made that egg, exploring, examining, experimenting. I will marvel at how much larger those fingers have grown and how much more they can do. I will delight that those fingers are still being used to create, to build, to explore. All that, just from one single egg.

Photo A Day, Day 18: Good

My husband and I have quite a few catchphrases that we repeat to each other on a regular basis. When we both say (or think) the same thing at the same time, we say, “Get out of my head, David Blaine!” When we pull out of the driveway on any kind of a road trip, we announce, “’We’re off!’ the captain shouted!” When one of us makes a clever remark or wise observation, the other one says, “You’re good at this game.” And when a messy or unpleasant situation of some kind gets resolved (or at least, ends), we remark, “It’s all good.”

No matter how nasty things get, once they’re over, it’s all good. My daughter nearly drowned in our swimming pool last year, and the week she spent in the hospital was the worst week of my life. But the day she came home, it was all good. Our family has lost loved ones, some suddenly and unexpectedly and some with weeks or months of preparation, and our hearts were broken, but life goes on and it’s all good. I got laid off and struggled with depression over it, but then I became a stay at home mom, and it’s all good.

Today is Good Friday, which for a Christian is about the worst day ever. God was dead, in a sense. How much worse could anything possibly get than that? And yet, just three days later, Christ arose and our sins were forgiven forever. How much better could anything possibly get than that?

Christ is dead today. But Sunday’s coming, so it’s all good.

Does Anyone Still Wear a Hat?

My husband and I love dressing up. And Easter is an ideal time for dressing up, especially if you like coordinated family outfits. And especially if you love hats. I do love hats, but unless you’re unusually fashion-forward or unusually good-looking, the only occasions when you can get away with wearing a hat are Easter and the Kentucky Derby. So this year, my daughter and I wore our Easter bonnets to church.

Our congregation includes a number of older ladies who are always stylishly dressed, so I was quite surprised (and a bit saddened) to find that the two of us were the only ladies at church on Easter Sunday who were wearing hats. I had been looking forward to admiring some lovely Easter hats!

When I was a little girl, the excitement of Easter was not just the promise of candy left by the Easter bunny, but of a whole new outfit that included a dress, white shoes, white gloves, a white purse, and a hat. I always felt so grown up and elegant in my outfit, mainly because of the hat and gloves.

Another early hat memory is also from my church. I was raised in a large Baptist church in a city with a number of other Baptist churches, and once a year all the Baptist congregations would have a combined service at our church, since we had the biggest sanctuary. It was always a fascinating service for me, since it was so different from our usual Sunday service. My church was quite conservative and sedate, a style that I would learn in college to refer to as “back-seat Baptists.” No-one ever sat in the pews closest to the pulpit, the pastor never said things like, “Can I get an ‘Amen’?”, the choir sang arrangements of 100-year-old hymns, there were no instruments other than the organ and occasionally the piano, and no-one ever stood up or raised their arms or said anything from the pew other than a polite murmured, “Good morning,” in response to the pastor’s greeting. But when Calvary Baptist joined us, the church service was a whole different animal. Calvary was a Southern Baptist, mainly African-American congregation, and they ROCKED. There was clapping. There was a constant chorus of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Praise Jesus!” and “Preach it, brother!” – even while the pastor was talking. ESPECIALLY when the pastor was talking. There were raised arms and people stepping out of the pew. And if the pastor asked a question and you didn’t answer it loud enough, he would ask it again and again until he got a loud enough response. To a small child, it was fascinating and intimidating all at once. But the best part of all was the hats.

The Calvary ladies would not have dreamed of going to church without a hat. It was as unthinkable as showing up in your underwear. Or even worse, PANTS. I loved to look at the ladies in their beautiful jewel-colored suits and their magnificent hats. To my small-town eyes, they looked like flock of beautiful, exotic birds.

 

 

 

My simple, white garden hat adorned with a single pink flower doesn’t even attempt to match the striking stylishness of the hats of my childhood. But I will continue to dip my toe in the pool of millinery in the hopes that others will join me in attempting to bring back the hat. Derby Day is coming, and maybe I’ll be brave enough to wear something closer to the church ladies’ hats of my memory. Maybe something like this?

 

Hmmm, I think I might not be ready for that one quite yet.

 

I Saw the Sign(s)

Since this morning was sunny and relatively warm, and since my kids (and myself) seem to be suffering from a bit of cabin fever and a desperate need of fresh air, I decided that it would be a good day to take a long walk. And since I’ve been reading up on homeschooling lately and am getting inspired, I also decided that it would be a good opportunity to learn about spring. So as part of our walk, we looked for signs of spring. This is what we found!

1.      Puddles

We traced some puddles back to clumps of snow that were melting. We traced other puddles back to hoses coming from people’s basements. Both sources of puddles are definitely a sign that the snow is melting and spring is coming!

 

2.      Mud

Much like #1 above, mud is a sometimes unpleasant sign of the coming of spring. Melting snow mixed with road sand and clots of dirt thrown up by careless snowplows results in fascinating mud sculptures in the shape of everything from tire ruts to fantastical cityscapes. And, of course, muddy footprints. Lots of muddy footprints. A sign not only of the arrival of spring but also of the need of spring cleaning in its many forms.

 

3.      Easter decorations

We saw several houses with Easter flags or Easter baskets or Easter bunnies or spring wreaths hanging on their front doors. We saw one house with two bushes out front covered with brightly colored plastic Easter eggs. We saw a neighbor hanging up a big Easter bunny flag. He asked my son if the Easter bunny was coming to our house and what he would bring. My son said that he WAS coming and would bring us Easter eggs with candy inside! Anticipation of Easter candy by small children is a sure sign of spring.

 

4.      Birds

We heard lots of birds singing their spring songs: the distinctive “chim-chim-cherreeee” of a red-winged blackbird, the “sweeeeeetie” call of a lovesick chickadee, the serene hooting of a mourning dove. We saw a robin hopping about searching for worms. We saw a bird’s nest in a tree. Seeing and hearing more birds than we have in a while, and especially hearing the change in their songs to their spring mating calls, is one of the earliest – and one of my favorite – signs of spring.

 

5.      Budding plants

The tree in our front yard has fat, fuzzy buds all over it. There are a dozen or so dwarf irises peeking their little green noses through the dirt and snow by our front steps. We saw some forsythia that was starting to bud. One of our neighbors has clumps of some kind of decorative grass that has some fresh, bright green tips poking up among the dead brown leaves from last year. In a year when we’ve been taunted by warm weather interspersed with snowstorms, new green leaves are a reassurance that eventually the snowstorms will stop coming and the warm spring weather will be here to stay.

 

It felt good to get some fresh air and exercise, it felt great to spend time talking and learning with my kids, but it felt spectacular to prove to myself that spring really is on its way. I know it is, because I saw the sign(s)!

Finishing the Hat

This weekend was an especially busy one. My husband left for a retreat at the crack of dawn on Friday morning and got home late Saturday night. We hosted the family for Easter dinner on Sunday, plus I was teaching the pre-school Sunday school class. I had a whole list of things to get done on Friday and Saturday: take both kids to gymnastics, shop for groceries, bake Easter dessert, clean the house for company, buy treats for the Easter baskets, dye Easter eggs, set the table, put together the family’s Easter baskets, plan my Sunday school lesson and find craft supplies for it, find a pair of white shoes that fit, cook the carrots for Easter dinner, sew pink ribbon and a flower onto my Easter hat, and amidst all that, keep the kids fed and bathed. Whew! There were a few things I was tempted to drop off the list, and one of the things that almost didn’t get done was to finish trimming my hat. Would it really matter all that much if my hat had a black ribbon instead of a pink one? Or if it didn’t have a flower to match my daughter’s hat? Was it really worth the time and effort to get all our outfits so coordinated or our hats to be matching?

At the end of the day, it turned out that it was. Not only did the whole family look lovely and festive,
but the three girls in our matching dresses and hats were absolutely the hit of coffee hour after church.

Three pretty girls in three pretty hats is not a sight you see every day, and we attracted our share of attention and compliments. And the boys in their handsome matching suits got nearly as much attention. It felt really nice, not just because it’s nice to get compliments, but because it really made us feel like a family. We worked together to make our outfits work together. We both complemented and complimented each other. It was really fun to make such a public announcement that we are a family. We go together, we live together, we work together.

Yup, it was definitely worth finishing the hat.

In Our Easter Bonnets

Yesterday was Easter, so of course the entire family got all dressed up in our Easter finery and went off to church. My mom had gotten Ryan a pair of adorable yellow plaid overalls with a matching yellow polo shirt, I was wearing a pretty cream and mauve chiffon dress, and Herb had on a crisp pink shirt and a classy lavender tie.

As we walked up the steps into the church, we were admiring the families ahead of us who were also all dressed up: little girls in pastel dresses with white sweaters and shoes and little boys in shiny dress shoes and button-down shirts. Even the parents all look crisper and dressier than most Sundays.

As with most churches on Easter Sunday, we had plenty of visitors and extra family filling the pews. We sat one row closer to the front than usual because of the crowd, and a family that slipped in the pew behind us whispered, “Someone’s sitting in our regular pew! I don’t think that’s ever happened before!” Many of the children were obviously not regular church-goers, which is always amusing to me. As well as the usual hubbub and scuffling noises, one little boy a few rows behind us announced at regular intervals, “Daddy, I want to go home now!”, much to his father’s chagrin and his mother’s mortification. I was quite relieved that Ryan was on his best behavior and napped through most of the service, waking up only when the choir sang – he was laying crosswise in Herb’s lap at the time, and when the music started his eyes popped wide open, startled, and then he turned and stared at the choir, absolutely mesmerized, until they finished singing. At coffee hour after church, a fellow mom confided to me that she was tempted to point to Ryan and tell all the embarrassed parents, “Your child would behave like this if you came to church more often!” Of course, this is the first time in about 2 months that I didn’t have to take Ryan out of the service, but at least he saved his best behavior for a particularly important Sunday!

I was actually feeling quite proud of myself as we drove home from the service, with my handsome husband, my well-behaved son, and myself wearing an outfit unadorned with spit-up, my hair washed and brushed, and even wearing a bit of lipstick! (I had two big runs in my pantyhose, but they were mostly hidden by my skirt and shoes, so I wasn’t even counting that against myself.) In fact, we looked so good that we called over a neighbor to take our photo in front of the house, and as I admired the photo later in the day, I was a bit deflated as I realized that on the front door of the house, plainly obvious in the background of the photo, was our Christmas wreath and Christmas swag, very much in evidence. I was embarrassed for a moment, but then I just laughed, knowing that having my family together for a joyous Easter celebration was so much more important than taking down the Christmas decorations.

So I plan on keeping this photo close at hand, and any time I feel like I’m getting behind with the mundane things of life like laundry, or dusting, or taking down various holiday decorations, I’m going to look at it and see what a wonderful happy family is gathered in front of those Christmas decorations that have been up for five months, and I’ll remember what is truly important to me.

Happy Easter!!