wonder

They are called Pyanski Eggs and every Lent, our parish keeps the supplies for making them out and available in the basement to both the kids and adults who like to work on them during coffee hour. It is a multi-step process requiring more concentration then one might think a child had in them, particularly a certain six-year-old boy child who is fidgeting always, always fidgeting, and yet, as you can see above, my son, Benjamin, daughter, Priscilla, and niece, Isabelle (with the patient help of "godfather Steve") worked diligently and with rapt attention on their own colorful creations for a long old time. I am looking forward to putting all of their eggs in a basket on my dining room table as a centerpiece for our Pascha Feast. Ahhh, Pascha.

April begins the overlap of soccer, drama and ballet with tee ball and soft ball. I'm feeling a little behind already and a bit melancholy. I am not too sure at all that these two things are even remotely related but they are the dominant emotions keeping me company at the moment while I drink my coffee and await the sound of footsteps stomping hungrily down the stairs. It is a brand new week, a brand new morning, and presently I am lingering expectantly, somewhere between intimidation and inspiration. What will I do with the clean, blank, whiteness?

I've been spending my evenings, recently, with a young Flannery O'Connor. A week ago, I found a biography about her in our library's New Non-fiction section and I've become, now, even more fascinated by her life and writings. Her father died when she was just fifteen-years-old and she wrote the following, two years later, in a tattered old journal:

The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side. A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even beyond grief, wonder. Our plans were so beautifully laid out, ready to be carried to action, but with magnificent certainty God laid them aside and said, "You have forgotten - mine? "

Wonder. Maybe that's what it is - wonder at the enormity of it all. Life and death, the power and consequence of our every day choices, my role as a mother to these children so young and hopeful, needing me to stay hopeful by keeping my eyes locked on Christ while the waves, the turbulent waves, lick at my knee caps.

Here comes little Mary.

And now it begins.