An Easter Request

Today, my One-Hour-A-Day-Dog decided she would like to become an organist.

However, after my description of the stops, keyboards, and footboard -- familiarity I learned from playing the pipe organ at St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Gracie turned in disappointment to mark yet another patch of grass, and I felt compelled to join her.

On Celebrating Easter without Being Religious

Bells!

They started on Good Friday, at the wrong time (there are usual times and then are wrong ones because they are unusual).

It took me several minutes to remember the Way of the Cross.

Then, this morning, knowing that it was Easter, I heard bells twice -- once at the lake


and once at home, when Doodlebug expressed dismay:

She wasn't too sure about the bells, but me? I love them! 

Even when they ring at night, which they did last night.

I wouldn't mind Easter once a week if it's bring on the bells.

The Ephemeral Constancy of Is

A daily walk to a familiar place can be a sobering experience.

What was there once is likely not there next.

To wit: a pickerel frog yesterday, a spectacularly magenta plant today.

I had taken the frog for dead because I approached, slipped, stomped, sat, and leaned in. Close. Too close, I thought, for a living amphibian. But the frog never moved, the eye never blinked, no breath escaped. Today, I could find no evidence of frog -- no indentation in the mud or sign of struggle. No fleshy bit left behind after a scavenger's meal.

Today, I took the lake itself for unphotographable -- at least by me. Heavy mist became rain, then shifted into fog. Although I lay on wet grass and sand and aimed at tiny violet flowers sprouting up like a baby's giggles from no known source, I could not focus, or frame, or take a single snap worth saving. So I started back to the car, and that's when I saw the color, so brilliant as to be unbelieved. But magenta it was, and the photo is real.

Today, many of my friends and some of my family celebrated Easter, a time of new coming that returns every year, a reminder of the rising of a man into his godhood or of a god out of his manhood and of faith at the end of winter turning into spring.

Every day I walk into a new becoming, a reminder of risings and dyings, always turning from what was into what is, making what is what was in less time than I can type a single letter or think it.

Today, I celebrate the constancy of is.

Easter 1952 or 1953

Until she died when I was 16, my mother made all my clothes (except bathing suits and, as I needed them, underwear beyond little girl frilly panties). She even ordered Harris tweed from Scotland to make my first real winter coat. She took me to fabric stores to shop for patterns and fabrics; she asked me to select yarns for sweaters.

I think her favorite dress-making came at Easter when she made a new dress and Daddy took a picture of the two of us posing in the yard. (Based on the outward thrust of my chin, I think this must have been 1952 or 1953, prior to the effects of orthodonture.) Here we are on Memory Lane in front of her rock garden, which she planned, planted, and maintained. In the bed to her right, in a spot hidden by the tree, she killed a copperhead with a hoe while I watched from a bed of day lillies just below the cross-tie steps in front of us. In that same bed she planted the galax Calla sent from camp in the fall.

Now the photograph is framed with the newspaper clipping on which Mother wrote, "first attempt." I don't know when it appeared, but I assume it must have been in The Birmingham News on a Mother's Day prior to her wedding to my father. Not only did my mother make clothes, but she also made occasional poems, of the sentimental and the humorous kinds. Read the poem, and you will see that Mother followed a tradition set by grandmother, whom we called "Dear."