I'm here to bring you all the forsythia content you can handle. In other bizarro news, I've never seen a snake here in February, and I can't remember ever seeing a snake in my own yard. But last night, coming in from a walk with Dora, what was whiplashing its way across the back walk and into the flower bed, but some kind of little snake? It was too dark to see what kind it was, and I imagine it was just a harmless little grass variety, but my goodness. In February.
Of course, today is the day when it's supposed to be 84F, so why not? Bring on all the dormant wildlife, I guess.
A beautiful Ash Wednesday Mass with Imposition of Ashes at the Abbey yesterday afternoon. The Abbot, in his homily, turned to the Passion narrative and the Last Supper, and the Lord saying to His gathered apostles, that he calls them not slaves but friends. Well, said the Abbot, how many of us have been His friends since the last time we all sat here with ashes on our heads? What have we done to be His friends, but more to the point, what have we failed to do?
After that we came home and had bean soup for supper, with a loaf of cheese bread (which I got up and finished at midnight, because although I hadn't been that hungry all day, in the middle of the night I suddenly was). I walked Dora in the dark. Had some poetry chat with my friend Fr. Robert in Australia, said the rosary, went to bed (but not to sleep, because see hungry, above).
Here's a shot of my closet at the start of Lent --- not that there's anything especially Lenten about it, just that times like this in the year feel like touchstones, when I want to clean and order things.
Again, this is the whole of my wardrobe --- minus yesterday's dress, which fell victim to some little splatters of soup and had to be spot-cleaned, and minus my under-bed bins of leggings and tights, socks and underthings. I enjoy the visual palette as a thing of pleasure in itself, apart from the pleasure of wearing the items that comprise it.
Wearing today, in fact:
Wool& Audrey, who has had a nice rest of about ten days. I reached for her in part because I knew it had been a while. She's the perfect dress for a late-winter day that's going to aspire to early-summer temperatures. With her, for my Lenten purple: old thrifted Eddie Bauer cotton cardigan (bought for 25 cents some years ago, with three other sweaters, from a "four-for-a-buck" rack at the thrift shop down the street) and new-to-me thrifted Birk Balis.
Back in my blue Mrs. Who glasses:
I love having some choices. What I love about these is how the color instantly brightens my skin. Easiest makeup in the world to put on and wear. This, I think, is ideally what you want the colors you wear to do: to brighten and even out your skin tone, to brighten your eyes, to make you look, instantly, as though you had tried, when in fact the only trying you did was a choice about color. Mind you, I could take a really bad photo of my 58-year-old face right now, if I felt like it. This happens to be a fairly good photo of my 58-year-old face. But it is a photo with no filter or alterations at all, and it is a photo of my 58-year-old face in the morning with no makeup. I'll take it.
As much as I'd love to sit here all day drinking coffee and ruminating, I suppose that there are things that I must do, and that now is the time when I should arise and do them. Maybe one more cup of coffee . . .