Garden diary items:
#1: Wood iris, from a tiny clump given me some years ago by Jane-next-door. I've divided them several times since then and have big clumps in several places, front and back.
#2: Salad greens (butter lettuce, beet greens, arugula with the absolute last daffodils):
#3: More kitchen-garden containers, filled and planted yesterday (yellow tomatoes with basil and sown marigold seed, a grouping of peppers, zucchini which I'll probably regret, and eggplant):
#6: Baby blackberry vines looking tiny but doing well:
#7: Strawberries (Dora ate the first ripe one):
What I wore to Mass today:
No wool for a change, just some very old favorites: this little jersey top with embroidered detail and graceful neckline, which I bought new at the now-defunct Belk department store possibly as long as ten years ago; this a-line linen floral skirt, bought in a thrift shop long enough ago that at least three businesses have come and gone in that Main Street storefront since; fake Birks I impulse-bought at Walmart at the start of lockdowns in 2020 and really have not ever regretted buying. They're not as comfortable as real Birks, but they're comfortable enough and have held up surprisingly well through two years of fairly constant wear. I love this skirt and always feel good in it --- I think fit-and-flare is really my silhouette, though it can be hard to find dresses cut like this that aren't out of some crisp fabric like poplin, which isn't really me.
Meanwhile, I mean, yeah, I do actually have a face:
This shot shows the square-ish neckline of this top a little better. I dread the day it falls apart, because it's one of those items I feel reliably good in, every time I put it on.
Today's Gospel and homily made me ponder how the story of Thomas in the upper room is really a story of the triumph of ontology over epistemology: Thomas's doubt has zero effect on the reality of the risen Jesus. Jesus doesn't cease to be alive simply because Thomas refuses to believe that He is. That, it seems to me, is the real thrust of that Gospel narrative. It's not about doubt, either to glorify or denigrate it. Human doubt just is, like the weather. But the real triumph is in the fact that our doubt has no power. It can't make real things unreal. We can't doubt God out of existence. All we do is box ourselves up in the smaller reality of what we can see, and if we think that's all there is: well, too bad for us, but God goes on existing all the same. Jesus goes on being alive, not dead. It's true in the second reading, too, from Revelation, where John, of all people, who had lain on His breast at the Last Supper and taken His mother home with him --- John, the Beloved Disciple --- doesn't recognize the figure in gold until the figure says who He is. We don't have to recognize Him. He just IS. It's not our memories, our emotions, our experiences, or our imaginations that keep him afloat, but rather the opposite. I think I'm going to practice relaxing into that a little bit today.