49/365 Lent Preparations at church

"How about I just come on down?" I offer to Sr. Hildegard after we keep trying and failing to make ourselves understood on the phone. We're trying to set things up for Lent. So I get Leo dressed and walk out into the February gray.

In church, no one is there. I walk up to the sacristies and start the work anyway, thinking Hildegard and Jack must not be far behind. Something about setting up is making Leo completely inconsolable--the church is big and he is small; I've put him behind the altar on a small step up that he doesn't know how to get down from. He's stuck and sad.

I finally call Hildegard on my cell and she comes right over. I'm hunting through purple fabric, hoping with very little reason that the purple banners are not the stiff ones I hate. But they are. I dump them on the floor of the sanctuary and drag out the purple fabric. I see what I'm going to be doing this week.

Jack comes in and we talk a minute about where to put the curtain rods up in the choir loft. We've hung banners from there before, but they've always been secured with random objects: a pair of scissors, a music book, a screwdriver. They slip and I have to hike up there and readjust them. I really like the look of the banners hanging down, sort of enveloping the congregation in the color of the season, but we need a better system.

Which is what Jack does. For a long time before I met him I knew him only as "Magic Jack" because that's how Hildegard referred to him. Something broke? Let's see if Jack will fix it. Something needs changing? Jack could probably do it. He's a friend of Fr. Miguel's who started coming to church here when Miguel arrived. I know there are many others like that, just like I'm sure we lost people when Bill left, but we were the winners on that balance sheet. I like Jack. The same things about the parish that annoy me, annoy him. And that goes a long way to establishing oneself in the positive column.

So we stand there in the sanctuary pointing up at the choir loft and saying things like "the third circle with a cross has the rectangle to the side, not the little rectangle but the big one that envelopes it, and I was thinking we could hang banners...." Which was almost as bad as trying to do it over the phone but we managed to make ourselves understood.

I had a flash, after he left to go buy curtain rods, of using several different colors of purple and doing something, well, interesting. But then another word came to mind: Lent. Maybe for Advent I could do something fun with purple. But Lent needs to be more formal. Set. Not eye-catching and inspiring as much as a reminder that it is Lent.

So I came back after school, after Mike was home, and I rolled out the big never-ending bolt of woven purple fabric on the floor of the sanctuary and cut yards and yards of it with floral scissors not up to the task. I folded it up to take home and hem. Then I wrapped the grapevine wreaths with purple floral ribbon for the outside doors. Found the brown pots and put the curly willow I'd saved from November into them. I love curly willow, and with nothing else in the pots it is stark and thirsty looking. Good for Lent.

I realized suddenly it was 5 minutes until 6, when I had to pick up the girls at their after school art program. I grabbed up the purple cloth and the two pots for the back of church by the holy water fonts. I turned off the lights and headed out in the darkness. The church doesn't scare me anymore like it did last fall, even in the darkness with the votive candles giving off strange shadows on statues. I placed the pots where they belonged and fumbled with my keys in the darkness, finally finding the correct key to let myself out of church and into the dusk of February, the cars blowing past, the strangers walking on the street. It felt like Lent.

56/365 Lent is for giving up

Sophia is big into telling Maeve what she should give up for Lent. This is right up Sophia's alley: religious, creative, and bossy. Maeve, however, is reacting just as she should. She ignores her. It's a good system they have.

Sophia has given up watching TV after school. She can watch if we're all watching, which is rare, actually, except that the Olympics have been on and she really wanted to see them. As vices go, this is small, and she decided being with her family was more important (and seeing ice skating was just an added bonus).

Maeve has decided, essentially, to ignore Lent. I don't push this sort of thing, frankly, because, (a) she is 5, and (b) punishing rules about religion without the capacity to understand them well leads to early burnout. I'd like my kids to stay religious and faithful throughout their lives, wherever they land, and so I'm not going to rap knuckles and Hail Mary them to death. Maeve is greatly interested in why we give up meat, however. Especially why shrimp is not meat but chicken is, even though they are both breaded and dipped in ketchup in her mind and therefore are essentially the same thing.

I have given up yelling at my kids for Lent. Not yelling, because I still do a lot of that: "SOPHIA! COME DOWNSTAIRS!" happens in a house with 3 floors. But I no longer get angry and yell. It's made me realize how much I yell at my kids, and this was not a pleasant realization. But it's been going ok. I do a lot of calm repetition of phrases, though, which will get just as old as time goes by: go back to your room now and find your tights before you come down and brush your teeth go get your tights go get your tights go--thank you. But we leave the house in the morning just a bit more calmly, I think.

I considered coffee but I didn't want to fail the first week. It's been a rocky start to my Lent--not Lent's fault, but just circumstances around me. Leo's been hard to handle (teeth? personality disorder?), Mike's been teaching (meaning late nights and doesn't feel like talking when he gets home), the house is a mess because of both of those, and dang it, it got cold again. Add that to the trivia night I'm running this weekend and girl scouts and I'm swamped.

But I'm working hard to not let it get away from me. I make myself listen to the silence when it's there. Like right now.

69/365 Checklist Stream of Consciousness

Rose is the color of this Sunday. I have to put up something rose to accent the purple. But after the reconciliation service, which I need to attend. Sophia? I don't know if I can swing that. But I'll be there. And I figure something out with the pink stuff.

Then almost immediately I have to do red banners for Palm Sunday. so much red in back, that should be no problem at all. I'd love to add something to that. I have this compulsion to create these days, something that was gone for a long time is back. The house is almost all the way clean, everything but my room. My room is always last. That says something.

Easter flowers. Have to call Fiona....done. "Does Lynn ever get on your nerves?" she asked.

Banner. I know what I want to do. I don't have enough interesting whites to do it. I have the blue and red and some other things. Now is the time. Do it. No. First, finish up the red for Palm Sunday. Eee.

Purple down, red up, red down, white. Easter is exhausting. I hope Leo is feeling better by then or this will do me in. That whole week of hurry up and wait. And the stones. There are no stones for the font. I don't want to use concrete. But I can't spend my life driving through North St. Louis stealing cut stone. Lynn. She isn't going to come through on this and then is going to complain about the result we'll have come up with because she couldn't come through on it. At least that morning Jack, Miguel, Hildegard, and I can put it together and have enough emotional distance from it to laugh.

Easter season is so dang long to keep flowers alive.

Banners will have to be semi-reversible because they hang. Thinking. I love thinking about this. I hate thinking about finding cut stone to build a temporary font.

Glow in the dark strips for the side steps. I wonder if stars will do. I have those in abundance. They really glow. I'll have to try it out. Hmm.

70/365 Lenten Obligations

I gave up yelling at my kids for Lent. I broke it once thus far, in a major way, I remember, but I don't even recall what it was about.

But it's been good. I am remembering that Maeve is not a short 8 year old and the rules are different. Sophia and I have space in our relationship to build up new things. Maeve doesn't walk around like she's being punished for existing.

The difference is so shockingly palpable.

Habits are hard to break, and this was something that grew out of complete lack of resources--last summer I could barely get out of bed due to my thyroid condition. Everything crumbled around me and my kids caught the rough side of that. This fall, things were better, and as winter approached, even more so, but I was in this habit of handling things in a shrill yell up the stairs, in a shoving kids out the door at the last moment to get to school.

And in order to change that, I had to wake up a half hour earlier each day so things could be done in time to leave. I had to climb stairs, which was hard to do without holding onto the wall 9 months ago, but now is no big thing. I had to keep up my end of many bargains and stop setting up my children for abject failure.

It's been 3 weeks of it working. And actually, it wasn't hard.

How many other things, how many other habits, are here that just need a nudge to overthrow them? Imagine how much better life would be if.

77/365 Spring

It's getting warmer here. Last spring is a blur for me. I'm not sure I even really remember Easter Vigil. Did I spend it in the Utah Vestibule? Probably. I don't even have a record of it at South City Musings. Didn't say a word. I was exhausted and it was the new growing season and rejoicing and its record is missing along with the 1890 census.

I look at my yard, with the forsythia actually blooming and the crocus done for the year already and I realize that life goes on even if I don't have a hand in it. The yard is a mess, but it is relatively alive. So strange, staring out my back window and seeing the garlic growing with no help from me at all. There it goes.

It will happen with or without me. But I'm learning this Lent that I'd rather be a part of it than not.

89/365 Holy Thursday Set Up

Everyone else got there at 7:00. I breezed in at 7:30--Mike had just arrived home from Indianapolis and we'd put a quick dinner on the table first. Most everything was done, frankly. The altar of repose was set up in the Utah Vestibule. The place was clean. The red was down from Palm Sunday.

And my head was so fuzzy from whatever--a long weekend, single parenting, too much wine, whatever--that I was nearly useless. So it was good that we were almost finished.

I polished brass and wished I had a thought in my head.

I watched as other people busied themselves washing up the bowls and pitchers for the mandatum (the foot washing) and thought about how much better I am on paper than in person.

I took wreaths off the doors and disassembled the Palm Sunday adornments, to ready them for Easter (red and palms off, to be replaced later with....something...) and found myself yearning for ordinary time.

It hasn't been a good week.