Holy Saturday

The music that I have been listening to for the past two nights is by a variety of composers, not Mozart as I had thought. It is gorgeous and I will listen to it again this evening even though it is not specifically for Holy Saturday.

I remember waiting in the cold dark church while the paschal fire was kindled outside on a barbecue and the Paschal candle lit. The passing of the lights to the little candles held by everyone in the congregation is one of the most special rituals of the whole year. Trying to keep the candles straight up and not dripping wax onto one's hands is another very practical memory. The lessons, chanted during the vigil service, are long, reminding us of the long slow journey to salvation through Jesus while we wait, symbolically, for His resurrection. (Somebody usually quips that the length of the readings reminds us also that the pews we sit on are hard--the last penance for Lent!) Then just as sleepiness and waning candle light are about to overcome us lights come on, bells ring, the organ plays--if you are really lucky there might even be a tuba or a krumhorn or two. The celebrant intones, "Gloria in excelsis Deo," the words not sung for the weeks of Lent and the choir responds, "et in terra" and we are rejoicing. This is the shortest Mass of the year, I believe, and some pastors have the good sense to confine themselves to saying, "Rejoice. He is Risen. Alleluia. Happy Easter," rather than to try to take us on a post-midnight (and sometimes post-modernist) theological journey of discovery when what we want to do is sing our heart out and go home to our nice warm beds.

After two days of no Mass, the short Easter Vigil Mass is its own surprise and it ends with a snippet of Matins, "And very early on the first day of the week, they went onto the sepulcher and found it lying empty, Alleluia." They, of course, were the women, who had waited at the foot of the cross on Friday weeping until they could almost not see.

I suppose that one shouldn't have favorite parts of these great services, they do after all have a seamless whole. Still the Gloria and the Matins verses and the singing of Alleluia at the end of everything are my favorite parts of the Easter Vigil.

Deo Gratias, Alleluia. Ite Missa Est, Alleluia. These are two more of my favorite parts. The Liturgy is such a great gift of the heritage of Catholicism. This is a good day to give thanks for it.

Easter is a great gift of hope and joy to us who believe that Jesus has given us Eternal Life. Today we wait, hoping and expecting that tomorrow our joy may be full.

Homemade Luxuries

I was sixty before I discovered the immense pleasure of using a hand-knitted washcloth to wash my face. Now I don't want to use any other! I am spoiled.

Knitting washcloths is easy, rhythmic and mindless knitting--until the middle row when one has to remember to "reverse engineer" the thing and start making decrease rows. After that it goes back to being automatic. I can see why women made washcloths in bygone days--they weren't swamped with mail order catalogs advertising sales, couldn't drive to the outlet mall and needed something to do with their hands that would soothe their minds.

Washcloths are the epitome of "mindless knitting" and would occupy time while waiting. Women have always waited, for children, for husbands, for sailors to come home from the sea, for wars to end, and just for pots to boil.

Now I knit to wait for the news to get to the weather so I can turn it off and go to bed. I knit because it's there to pick up and soothe. I knit to experiment with different yarns and eventually I plan to design and knit a sweater to keep me warm.

Hand-knitted items are homemade luxuries. So much nicer than store-bought. So much more personal than mass-produced. I wear hats all winter and I hope to venture into socks eventually--but I think I really do need a teacher for that.

Chocolate fudge is another home-made luxury. That is another post! I am grateful to make something mundane into something extraordinary and to make it for myself.

Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is today. My new room, the one that M painted last summer has three pale green walls to blend in with a beautiful poster of Our Lady of Guadalupe that is now mounted where it is a focal point not only for the room but for me as I walk down the hall. I remember reading the story when I was still a child; roses and a miraculous and splendidly beautiful painting. It is one of my favorites. When we moved to California, we became much more aware of the contributions of Mexican culture to our area. Many of our fellow parishioners were several genaration Mexican as we had been several generation French Canadian. They maintained cultural heritage and so our parish celebrated a Posada as part of the Christmas pageant and the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

A mariachi band processed down the street our church is on, turning into the parking lot just before the beginnings of early Mass (I think 6:30 am). After Mass a feast was held in the Parish Hall. My late father relished the story of how he accepted a steaming bowl of minudo and when he ate it rather gingerly his friend's then six year old son, said, "Daddy if the man does not want the minudo can I have it, please?"

Today M is flying home to California after her first semester of college and I am tracking her flight via the Internet. I won't know the precise moment that she and her Mama greet each other, but I will be close.

Now if Our Lady will help me to find the thing in my house which is lost, I will be much happier tomorrow for M and I will have a much easier time decorating my Christmas tree if I have it. (It is a small notebook with the inventory of Christmas boxes.)

Waiting

Yesterday and today I waited. While I waited I knitted. Somewhere along the way I made a major mistake. Over the next few days I will "unknit". Not as much fun as knitting, but the yarn is pretty. That will make the reknitting less tedious. At time I thought about starting a knitting business. I found that I could not knit fast enough and kept losing the scraps of notes that I took to turn into a pattern. No patterns emerged, except the patterns about myself that I learned from knitting--and other projects. Some of the current projects may go up on Etsy.

Part of the waiting consists in tracking packages through UPS. This is almost as much fun as ordering the packages or their actual arrival. I can track the packages I send too, one is on its way to my sister and I will know exactly when it arrives. This is fun, but probably not the most powerful thing the Internet is capable of giving us.

Yesterday while I waited for the UPS driver to collect the package I was shipping, I knitted and watched Oprah. The You Tube inventors were on. I haven't thought of using You Tube. (Somehow videos of me waiting and knitting don't seem like they would draw much of an audience.) Still it is rather interesting to play around with. Could I promote my Peace design with You Tube? More to think about.

It was a long day yesterday for another reason and that is that I had seen a blurb on Hallmark that they were going to show Pollyanna on Tuesday. I thought this would be two hours. It was three. Way past my bedtime! Still, it was a charming and sweet as I remember; the performances were quite good and it was stylized in a way that is so different from today's movies.s I remember when this movie first came out and that I went to the library in what was then my new hometown (we had just moved here) to find the book. It turned out to be a series, if my memory serves and it was long out of print already in 1960. Although it has not been a conscious expectation on my part, I have waited for a long time to see it again.

Tomorrow is another day and hopefully I will have more to say. Goodnight and God bless.

Awaiting the Best Guest

Cold this morning, quite warm this afternoon. In other words, the weather is seasonal for this time of eyar. A marked change from last week when we had a foretaste of winter or the weeks before that when the weather was hot, we are definitely into fall. The late afternoon sun slants into my dining room, the house is delightfully clean thanks to my dear housekeeper I who does the most wonderful job of keeping my house tidy and clean. The garbage waits for pick-up tomorrow and I wait even more eagerly for my sister's arrival.

New grandmother that she is, I expect that she will be tired when she arrives close to eleven tonight and we will be so grateful to our dear friend J for retrieving her from the big airport. At least she is flying straight thorugh without the usual stops and starts, so that is a blessing. Her bed is made up in the newly painted "big room", which can double as a guest room now and I am so excited and happy--will be even more so when she walks through the door.

In the meantime, I haven't gotten much work done but have tried to fix the prices that that price tool on Cafepress has ruined. It is a real shame that this is not working, for the new keepsake boxes are gorgeous. I just ordered three last week and they really are fine and elegant. I liked the old ones, so wasn't really pleased by the change. These are even better, lined with white silk velvet and backed on the bottom with black felt so that the boxes are non-skid and will not mar furniture. Truly exceptional.