For my take on this fifth day of Holy Week, see my post from last year:
Our Time Together is Short (Maundy Thursday 2021)
Maundy Thursday 2022
Palm Sunday 2022
It’s Palm Sunday. A day that begs to be called out, to be distinguished from just any other first day of the week. It launches the period known by Christians the world over as Holy Week. Palm Sunday sets an expectant, celebratory tone, one that contrasts, shockingly and painfully, with the shattering disappointment of the terrible day we call Good Friday. In between falls the oddness of Maundy Thursday. So much is packed into the events of these seven days, which lead up to the triumphant culmination of Easter. Indeed, without Easter, the story of new life, hope and possibility would have been one of failure, death and despair. I’ve written about the days of Holy Week several times before. What else can I add? No doubt there is something. But for now, the various demands of life, including several painting projects, prevent me from writing any more.
So, here is last year’s Palm Sunday post:
Doesn’t Everyone Love a Winner?
The Lambs of March, Devoured by the Lions
In my last post I wrote of the lions and lambs of March sharing the field of play, taking turns. There’s been none of that good sportsmanship for the past few days. The lions seemed to have slaughtered and devoured the lambs.
The recent frigid weather rightfully belongs to January. Temperatures fall to the teens in the early morning hours and creep up to only just above freezing in the afternoons. Sharp winds gust with what feels like a vindictive malice, making it even colder. If you have to be outside, it’s best to move briskly. I think this, wistfully and often, as I stand, holding the leash attached to my sluggish senior dog. He may pace restlessly in the house, but once out of doors, Kiko tends to remain resolutely immobile, transfixed, his nose firmly planted in the grass, lost in a host of smells. A recent injury has slowed my fourteen and a half-year old dog even further. Our “walks” cover far less distance these days, but they’re more frequent, and we’re outside nearly as long.
Gazing out from sheltered comfort, the landscape often has the appearance of early spring perfection. Daffodils nod their sturdy golden heads amidst green sword-like foliage.
The cherry trees were coaxed toward peak bloom last week by a couple of almost summery days. Their blossoms form luminous clouds of pale pink in the bright sunshine.
But a clear blue sky shifts in an instant to a burnished and ominous steel gray.
Clouds race in, seeming to herald an approaching apocalypse.
Bitter gales and icy rainstorms whip through suddenly and repeatedly, doing their best to drive all delicate petals into the ground. On Saturday, my daughter and I attended a local high school production of Annie. After the show, we watched from the glass-enclosed cafeteria as a light drizzle began falling on a courtyard planted with small, lovely cherry trees. The falling petals looked like snowflakes. As the intensity of the rain increased, we looked out onto a blizzard-like scene. And then, as though for a definitive finale, there was a prolonged and pounding hailstorm.
Just another March lion, strutting his stuff. Take that, you pathetic lambs!
Our world, like this month, has far too many lions.
The Lambs and Lions of March
Spring arrived officially on Sunday. Yet here in Northern Virginia, the gentle lambs and roaring lions of March continue to alternate play, as they have all month long. A day of languid warmth and breezes bearing the sweet essence of the Caribbean is followed by one of bracing chill and icy gales. Dim, mist-shrouded dawns give way in an instant to brilliant sunshine and cloudless skies. A late afternoon that would be unremarkable in June is followed by a morning straight out of January, complete with sudden, swirling snow. But of course, this is March, every bit of it: dramatic, capricious, impulsive, dazzling March.
Recent nights have been clear and beautiful. Around midnight, when I’m typically awakened by Kiko pawing at my bed and looking confused, the late-rising moon is relatively low in the sky, enormous, heavy and golden. Just before dawn, it’s high, cold and distant, casting its final shadows on our lawn. And there is Venus, in her usual morning spot, seen glowing brightly from our front windows. Our daughter, ever the stargazer (she minored in astronomy), texted last night that Orion was emphatically visible from her apartment porch. It’s comforting to know that the same moon and stars are shining on her over there in Maryland.
March marches on. We’ll soon say goodbye to this month of many seasons and lightning-fast about-faces. A few more winter days may well tag along with April. No doubt some flashes of deep summer will be summoned, as well. But with luck, the first full month of spring will bring true spring, in all its pleasant, more even-tempered glory.
Welcome spring. We need you.
Ukraine Sunflowers in the Snow
I’ve been struck by how much the Ukrainian flag resembles a field of golden sunflowers under a brilliant blue sky. Was it so inspired, I wondered? No, apparently not. The blue over gold bands were first used in the flag of the Slavik twelfth-century Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia, located in what is now portions of Ukraine and Belarus. Sunflowers were a later addition to the landscape.
The sunflower, of course, is the national flower of Ukraine, and the country is one of the world’s leading producers of sunflower oil. Native to North America, the seeds were brought to the old world by early explorers. Ukraine’s general lack of humidity and its dark, rich soil make it an ideal place for sunflowers to flourish. Big fields of the flowers began to be planted there in the late 1700s in response to the Orthodox Church’s prohibition of the use of butter or lard for cooking during the Lenten season. There was no such ban on sunflower oil, and the golden fields became widespread.
Any image of a field of glowing sunflowers now evokes for me a vision of the Ukrainian flag. I felt moved to paint my own version of sunflowers beneath a blue sky. By the time I completed it, a late winter snow had fallen in our area, a product of the “bomb cyclone” that moved up the East Coast over the weekend. It seemed fitting to display the painting in the snow, propped against the ragged remnants of the old maple stump in front of our house. The Ukrainian flag, like a bright field of sunflowers, has become an emblem of hope in the midst of terrible adversity. As I watch the crisis intensify and become more tragically dire day by day, I feel helpless. I hear that line of the Lord’s prayer over and over in my head: Deliver us from evil.
May the sunflower-field flag of Ukraine continue to fly as a beacon of hope, and may the people of Ukraine be delivered from evil.
Ash Wednesday, Again
I wasn’t going to write about Ash Wednesday this year. I thought I’d exhausted the topic, never a crowd-pleaser, in years past. Didn’t I write about it just yesterday? See here for last year’s post. These days it seems like it’s always Ash Wednesday.
The pandemic has put us in a holding pattern of perpetual Lent. Just when we think the deliverance of Easter is about to arrive, it vanishes like a mirage. Perhaps, finally, the light at the end of the covid tunnel may no longer be that of the oncoming train. Could it be that this long, limbo season would at last be brought to a joyful conclusion? It seemed like a real possibility.
And then Putin began his invasion of Ukraine. Our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, anticipating the rebirth of spring, as we all do, are faced with the desecration of war instead. They must confront terrible choices: whether to fight or flee, whether to stay or to pick up hurriedly and go, leaving homes, businesses, farms and beloved animals behind. The enormity of the emerging loss must be confounding and overwhelming.
The path ahead is perilous and forbidding. For the Ukrainians most emphatically, and to a lesser but still substantial degree, for those of us who watch, anxiously, from afar. No easy solution is at hand, no matter how much world-wide support is forthcoming. There will be no feel-good, happily-ever-after ending to this crisis, which will have long-lasting global implications. Lives are being lost, and the losses will multiply as the conflict escalates. It’s hard to imagine any scenario in which Putin might back down.
These are dark days. But Ash Wednesday urges us to look, steadily and without flinching, into the darkness so that we can rediscover the grace of God that searches us out to lead us back into the light. It reminds us that hope remains, even during the darkest days. Even in death. Ash Wednesday tells us not to underestimate the power and persistence of love, light, and life.
Today I saw an interview with a Ukrainian woman sheltering in a communal space in Kyiv with her children, the youngest of whom was an infant, asleep in her arms. She said that the presence of her tiny daughter was a blessing to her and all the others there with her. The baby, she said, was living proof that innocence, that something good, something kind, still exists in the world. Ash Wednesday tells us that evil, despite its bravado and air of military might, is no match for true goodness.
This morning I came upon a patch of bright white snowdrops among the dead brown leaves in a friend’s garden. I hadn’t seen these humble little flowers in years past.
Their sweet, quiet beauty reminded me of the sleeping Ukrainian baby.
Snowdrops, like God’s grace, like God’s love, are persistent. They’ll be blooming before long in the forests of Ukraine.
For Ukraine
May our country and our world unite behind Ukraine:
in support of democracy and freedom, over tyranny and oppression,
unity over division, and good over evil.
An Old Love Note Inspires a New One
Several years ago I wrote about opening an old childhood stationery box to discover some vintage love notes written to me by a fellow classmate, when we were both in third grade. Recently I came across another such note, by the same sender. I knew him back then as Danny. We’re still in touch on social media, and now he goes by Dan. In this one, young Danny had opted for the uniquely inventive approach he had chosen in another of the letters. Typed on onion skin paper, it began boldly, with an all-caps declaration of love. What third grader was typing in 1970? An urban sophisticate like Danny, that’s who. He’d recently gained access to his mother’s cutting edge IBM Selectric. Below the greeting, the top quarter of the page is occupied by identical lines like this:
1oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Below these lines appears the word TIMES.
That’s a lot of love times.
And then this humble admission: I LOVE YOU MORE THEN YOU LOVE ME.
And, typed, but then unsuccessfully erased, is this:
Kiss me After School Greg ? or Danny
The absence of all-caps suggests that this is more of a whimsical wish than a demand.
The reference to a possible after-school kiss appears in another of the notes, and it baffled the adult Dan. He thought of himself a shy kid, certainly not one to request, or to expect, such a thing. Greg’s name is found in another of the notes, as well. The adult Greg cannot remember conspiring with Danny in the composition of love letters. That’s not surprising, considering that Dan and I have also forgotten many of the circumstances surrounding the making, sending and receiving of these decades-old dispatches.
The notes were compelling enough for me to save, and to keep, for all these years. They’ve become artifacts that bear witness to past selves, even though memories of that past have dimmed.
And they still have power. My husband was impressed. No matter who was responsible for the “kiss after school” line, it struck him as a great idea. This Valentine’s Day, inspired by the youthful audacity of Danny, or Greg, or both, he made me a card that read:
Want to kiss after school? With who? (Select one)
Below were three boxes to check, each beside his own name.
What would my third-grade self have done? Probably kept quiet, done nothing, except file the paper away safely, as I did with Danny’s letters. But the older me knew what to do. I checked all three boxes.
************************************************************************
For the earlier love-letter posts, from March 2014, see:
Young Love, Old Love Notes, Part I
and Part II
Happy Valentine’s Day 2022!
Foggy Morning, Foggy Memories
Out with Kiko on a recent damp, cold, foggy morning was like being immersed in a grisaille landscape painting. The world was drained of all color. Branches were inky black against a silvery sky, and distant trees were soft smudges of gray.
I was reminded of the few months I spent in Cambridge, England as a grad student while researching my dissertation. I remembered standing on the bridge over the River Cam, watching the form of King’s College Chapel slowly materialize through the mist, and realizing that those blurry shapes nearby were cows grazing on the Backs. I recalled the sharp, bone-numbing chill of the wind that blew across the Fens. I will never forget that intense cold of a Cambridge November, which overwhelmed the meager heating system in my rented room in an old house on Panton Street.
That part of my past is so distant now that sometimes it seems like it no longer belongs to me. Perhaps it’s even more remote because of its contrast with the predominantly home-bound sameness of the last two covid years. Did I really live for a year in England in my twenties? Did I travel in Britain and Europe, examining Gothic illuminated manuscripts in ancient libraries, having adventures and staying in seedy, ramshackle no-star hotels? Was that young woman really me? I have photos to prove it, as well as assorted associated memories. But some experiences, no doubt, cannot be recalled; they’re gone for good. Others can be only glimpsed; they’re in the process of dissolution. And with every passing year, they become more tenuous, wispy and ghost-like, threatened by the fog of time.
I’m resolving to reclaim that past before it’s lost. This winter I’ll look back on those photos and re-read my dog-eared travel notes. I’ll need help to make sense of them, because my own haphazard archives will be insufficient. I appeal now to those friends who adventured with me during that long-ago year in England. Let’s reminisce and compare memories; together we’ll reassemble portions of some of those old days piece by piece. They’re too precious to be forgotten. There will be missing pieces, of course. And missing companions. Sadly, not all of us have survived. All the more reason to start the process as soon as possible.