Beloved:

    Positively everything that should be is blooming right now:  Solomon’s seal, lilacs, wisteria, tulips, allium, dogwood, redbud, creeping phlox, irises, grape hyacinths, and bleeding heart.  The peonies (pronounced pineys), lily of the valley, creeping jenny  and backyard wisteria are all coming on strong.  I expected more life from my lavender by now, given our mild winter, but who can say about the lavender?  She’s a fickle one.  In the woods, mayapples are popping up and ferns are starting to unfurl.  Itching as I am to put plants in the ground I know it’s yet two weeks too early.  I well remember May of 1991, when snow fell on IU graduation.

     Sadly there’s trouble in the garden too.  Moles.  In all the years we’ve lived here I’ve always had one.  Not only didn’t I mind, I thought of him as my little helper, loosening up nice dirt along the edges of my garden that I then moved to other places in my yard.  But at least a brigade of moles has been at work since fall in mine and my neighbor’s yards.  He had his treated and said his problem’s solved.  I suspect our problem is now mine alone.  The chickens feast on all this turned soil.  The dogs nearly caught a mole on Sunday.  It can’t be a coincidence we never had a mole problem in the eighteen years Simba (the cat) lived with us.

     Thus the glory and the heartbreak of gardening.  Some years I decide I won’t.  “Forget it.  I’ll just buy everything at farmer’s market.”  But I always end up carrying plants home from farmer’s market.  I fuss over them, pick a handful of produce and still buy 90% of what we eat from the  market.  My system could hardly be more inefficient.  Or more satisfying.  I get to garden and eat.  The moles and chickens are happy enough.  The dogs will dig holes to their hearts’ content.  And by summer’s end my yard will look like a battleground where tiny little landmines have exploded.
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     But who cares about five months from now?  Right now it’s spring and my yard is beautiful, positively exploding with life.  I’m going outside.  

~peace & prayers,
pastor annette

Beloved:

I mostly work at home through Holy Week because of all the worship planning and sermon writing.  An extrovert like me needs to be away from people.  Only dogs and chickens to talk to out here, and none of them are Christian that I can tell.  They are utterly without preference for this or that line of liturgy.  

Holy Week preparation seemed so strange the first twenty years of my preaching life.  Writing Good Friday liturgy the same days I studied for the Easter sermon felt peculiar and improper.  Finally it’s beginning to feel like what I believe it really is:  one story.  One story, with many parts, that takes days and days to tell.  Or maybe it takes years and years and years.  The story didn’t happen all on one day and I’m glad the church decided not to tell it on one day either.  But instead to let us sit with the horror and darkness of Good Friday long enough truly to welcome the joy and the light of Resurrection Sunday.  
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These are our High Holy Days.  I very much look forward to seeing you for the Service of Tenebrae at 7:30 PM on Good Friday and our Easter Feast with Worship beginning at 9 AM on Sunday morning.

~ peace & prayers,
​pastor annette

​aren’t hers and puncture or toss them out.  Usually she’ll just sit on them alongside her own.  Cowbird eggs incubate for fewer days, so the chicks hatch and get more food than the other babies.  They are also given to shoving the other babies out of the nest.  One positive contribution of the brown-headed cowbird I could find is that they eat insects – lots and lots of insects.  They are also beautiful in their own, understated way.