Reality

My friends are all laughing at me and with good reason. They say I am showing untruths on this blog as I have been posting spring pictures that aren't quite 2018 reality. They are correct! I am living in a dream when I see our daffodil buds lightly yellowed but not open yet and our hyacinths close to the ground and not bursting into all those little swirls of color that get top heavy and fall over at maturity! Yes, I have been stretching the truth, but like all of us who are squirming in the last grasps of winter (poor folks in Minnesota this weekend--12" of snow?!??!!?) we know that we are oh, so close.

Inside we do encounter spring every day, however. Our chapel is full of lilies and mums and daffodils fully bloomed. It's beautiful and fragrant and, along with the Easter songs and hymns we sing at Morning and Evening Prayer, does at least remind us that we are suppose to be in springtime.

From our weekend...no tornadoes, no snow blizzards, no flooding, no thunderstorms, ONLY cold temps, a little wind and a Sunday morning surprise: I ran outside with my camera and caught our first ice storm....gone by 9:00 am.

Homebody

I didn't want to blog during a week's vacation in Florida, about the 80 degrees, sun and flowers there, especially when I realized that the daffodils were still in their "waiting" mode, as was much of spring, in Erie during that same week. But now that I am home-sweet-home and it's predicted to be 60 tomorrow, maybe the winter that won't leave the whole northern half of the country may finally be leaving it after all.

So even though I am a homebody at heart I am grateful for a week's respite from a very cold and very snowy winter and am looking forward to a beautiful spring that Erie always has. I wish that I could have said, "Beam me up, Scotty" to the whole community for a week in the southern sun, too!

A part of the inter-coastal waterways that wind their way through the cities of southern Florida.

April flowers

Spring is (almost) here!

Benedict welcomes everyone

I'm out of town for a week and hoping that this is what I'll come home to.

My favorite season for our front-lawn Benedict:

Easter-New Life

"Black Swallowtail"

The caterpillar,
interesting but not exactly lovely,
humped along among the parsley leaves
eating, always eating. Then
one night it was gone and in its place
a small green confinement hung by two silk threads
on a parsley stem. I think it took nothing with it
except faith, and patience. And then one morning
it expressed itself into the most beautiful being.

Mary Oliver

Celebrating Holy Week(end) and Easter

Lenten Monday meditation #6

"The Poet Thinks about the Donkey"

On the outskirts of Jerusalem
the donkey waited.
Not especially brave
or filled with understanding,
he stood and waited.

How horses, turned out into the meadow,
leap with delight!
How doves, released from their cages,
clatter away, splashed with sunlight!

But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual,
waited.
Then he let himself be led away.
Then he let the stranger mount.

Never had he seen such crowds!
And I wonder if he at all imagined
what was to happen.
Still, he was what he had always been:
small, dark, obedient.

I hope, finally, he felt brave.
I hope, finally, he loved the man
who rode so lightly upon him,
as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped,
as he had to, forward.

Mary Oliver

We, too, felt brave!