The weather last week, for the most part, was perfect springtime loveliness. The nights were still chilly, but the days were warm. We had temperatures in the 70's midweek and that is rare here for March. Even when it rained on Wednesday morning, it was a gentle spring rain that brought new vigor to the emerging garden. On the dry days, I accomplished a lot outdoors. The first job I tackled was raking up a winter’s worth of debris from the lawn. That took several hours and raised blisters on my hands in spite of the gloves I was wearing. I also did some weeding in the flowerbeds. The weeds seem to grow all winter under the snow. I pruned our lilac bushes. I did a severe pruning. The bushes were getting tall and leggy, so I cut them back by half to get them to fill out. That means we probably won’t get many flowers this spring, but the bushes will be fuller next year. I spent hours working my way through the flowerbeds and loving every minute of it.
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| My crocuses. |
Miriam’s peacock, Posey, is feeling the power of spring. He is old enough now that he has a beautiful tail. Last spring he did not. He spends a lot of time showing off his feathered finery. He’s been calling and strutting and shivering his beautiful tail to impress the chickens, but they don’t care. We found a farm over near Bedford that had a peahen for sale. Miriam made the purchase online. We were down state this weekend and on our way home we stopped and got her. She is a black shouldered peahen. We put her in the middle pen in the barn for now until she becomes acclimated. We’re hoping that she and Posey will like each other and settle in and raise a family.
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| Posey showing off to the uncaring hens. |
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| Our new peahen, Petunia. |
The most exciting outdoor project last week was progress made on the pond in the woodland garden. This is another of Miriam’s projects. We dug the pond last fall – actually our friend Ziggy dug it with his backhoe. Last week Miriam ordered the liners. They arrived on Monday and on Tuesday we installed them and began to fill the pond with water. It took several hours over Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning to fill it. On Wednesday we secured the edges. Next we will introduce aquatic plants and then fish and we will landscape around the pond. It’s going to be a great feature in our garden. We heard peepers singing from the beaver pond for the first time on Wednesday evening. Next year I’m hoping we’ll hear some from our own little pond.
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| The newly lined pond, almost full. |
The most exciting indoor project was that we had a new water heater installed on Thursday. Our old one still worked, but it was at least 30 years old and we feared its days were numbered. Rather than wait for it to fail to replace it, we were proactive and did it now. The new tank is 50 gallons where the old was 35, so the person further down the showering queue stands a better chance of getting at least a warm shower now.
We had our first thunderstorm of the year just before dawn on Friday. It was brief, but it gave us a few good flashes of lightning and claps of thunder. It poured rain for a quarter of an hour. Then the wind blew hard for a few hours. I went out on the front porch to watch the storm blow through. I anticipate watching many storms this summer on that porch. We love to do that.
I didn’t have a lot of time to sit indoors last week. With that lovely spring weather, I spent every moment I could outdoors. But the mornings were cold and while I waited for the rain to stop or sun to take off the frost and warm things up, I went on quests to find the perfect sort of music for a spring morning. Some mornings the music that fit the mood was exuberant, like going out and hearing the dawn chorus of the birds singing at full volume. Other times, I wanted to capture the serenity of a still morning when the shadows were full of frost and the world was just stirring to life. Some were obvious choices like Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words (Lieder ohne Worte ) Op. 62 No. 6 “Spring Song.” I think everyone who has ever watched a Looney Tunes cartoon knows that music. The same goes for Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” Suite No. 1 Op. 46 “Morning.” And then there’s the obvious “Spring” (La Primavera) from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concertos. But I also found other pieces that fit a quieter mood like Vaughn Williams’ gorgeous The Lark Ascending, a piece for violin and orchestra, and Gerald Finzi’s elegiac Romance in E flat major.
And then there’s Stravinsky. I cannot say that his ballet music La Sacre du Printemps, The Rite of Spring, is evocative of any spring mornings around here, but I thought of it one morning last week and listened to it for the first time in several years. I first heard it as a child exploring my parents' classical record collection. I was attracted to it because of its album cover, which showed Henri Rousseau’s haunting painting, The Snake Charmer. From the first mysterious bassoon melody of La Sacre, I was hooked. The music is strange, compelling, mysterious, violent – just what a young boy loves, at least this young boy did. That first encounter planted the seed of what would later become my growing love of Stravinsky’s music. I later encountered The Rite of Spring again when Walt Disney’s 1940 cartoon, Fantasia, was re-released in 1977. In Fantasia the music accompanied a depiction of prehistoric earth with volcanos and dinosaurs. When The Rite of Spring premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris in 1913, it caused an uproar. The music, combined with choreography by the famous Vaslav Nijinsky, was more than the audience could handle. Derisive laughter turned to angry shouting, people stormed from the theater. The critics called it a work of “puerile barbarity.” Despite that initial reaction, it went on to be considered one of the great masterpieces of 20th century classical music.
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| Rousseau's Snake Charmer. |
We keep our own rites of spring. I observed some of them last week when I hooked the garden hose back up and set up the rain barrels. Hearing peepers for the first time is a moment of high celebration. Finding the first of things is a ceremonious occasion for me – the first violet, the first daffodil, the first empty shell of a robin’s egg. I always take these items when I discover them and hold them as proof that the season is advancing.
On Friday Morning we left to spend the weekend at the Thayn’s house. We arrived at the Thayn’s around lunch time. The Fosters arrived later that night. We spent a lot of time doing the usual things we do when we are together. We play games. We eat great food. We have fun. On Saturday the weather was fine and we spent most of the day working in the Thayn’s yard. We weeded flowerbeds, raked up old leaves, burned overgrown parts of the bank.
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| Playing games with Grandma. |
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| Ice cream on the trampoline with Aunt Sarah. |
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| Rough housing with Aunt Hannah. |
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| Working in the yard. |
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| Watching Uncle Tosh burn leaves. |
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| Mabel just being cute. |
Because Easter Sunday coincides with General Conference this year (during General Conference weekend we watch ten hours of meetings, which doesn’t make for very good family interaction time), we decided to have our family get together a week early. It also happened that Passover began at sundown on Saturday. I know some people think it strange that we, as Christians, keep Passover. The Church, as a body, does not. We began our tradition as a family way back in the 80's. I’d read a bit about how Christ at the Last Supper was keeping Passover with his disciples as he instituted the ordinance of the Sacrament. I hadn’t thought about that until then and it intrigued me. I didn’t really know much about Passover except the Hollywood version of the story from watching The Ten Commandments (Moses will always look like Charlton Heston in my mind). I did some additional research and was fascinated by the ritual and symbolism, so we staged our own seder, emphasizing the Christian elements. We’ve had our own seder almost every year since then. The Passover as observed by the Jews for all those centuries and even to today, is about deliverance from slavery, from sin, and from death. From Moses’ time to the Last Supper, keepers of the feast retold the story of their deliverance from bondage and death through a series of miracles and, ultimately, through the blood of a lamb. The symbolism in all they did and still do points to Christ. During a Passover seder, the Jews break bread and bless it and drink wine that has been blessed. At the Last Supper, Christ altered those symbols. Instead of looking at their deliverance from death through the blood of a lamb, breaking the bread and drinking the wine would be done in remembrance of the Last and Great Sacrifice of the Lamb of God. The symbolism in the Passover is rich and detailed. We love telling the story of the deliverance of the Children of Israel from Egypt and the deliverance of all God’s children through the atoning blood of the Son of God.
The food at our seder was our traditional menu – apricot chicken, potato latkes, and the items used in the ceremony – hard boiled eggs, haroset (grated apples and ground almonds sweetened with honey and grape juice and spiced with cinnamon), parsley, horseradish, and lots of matzah. For dessert we had coconut macaroons that Miriam made and almond bread. It was all delicious.
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| Our seder. |
Today was Palm Sunday. We don’t do anything dramatic at church for Palm Sunday. We talk about it, that’s all. After we got back from church, we had lunch – meatloaf and leftovers from our seder. We left the Thayn’s at 2:30. Miriam stayed behind. Rachel has a doctor’s appointment on Tuesday and Miriam stayed to take care of the children while Rachel is at her appointment. Later in the week Rachel, Miriam, and the girls are coming up here to spend Easter with us. On our way home we took a long detour to pick up the peahen that Miriam bought. We just got home a half hour ago. We had a great weekend together and there will be more fun to come this week.
