Wednesday 13th April - Tea, coffee, ginger biscuits, bread and wine

 This morning our vicar came to bring us 'Home Communion' - the first time we have taken part in a service of Holy Communion since March 2020.

He's a good friend of ours and we have known him and the family since the 1990s when we joined our church. It's strange, thinking back to when the children were young, and our hair was still brown, and none of us wore glasses. Ah memory, memory.

So we sat round the garden table as the sun slowly warmed through the clouds. We started with tea, or coffee, and ginger biscuits made yesterday, catching up on church and family news. Then we pushed the teapot and mugs to one side, and brushed the biscuit crumbs off the table and continued seamlessly in the church service, complete with Bible reading (John chapter 14) and even a 'sermon' - if you could call it that, a few comments on the words. 

In the spaces between the prayers the breeze fluttered the table cloth, the glowing colours of the tulips and daffodils and the birdsong added to the sense of peace. A special moment, worth waiting for. 

In the past I always felt that a Sunday morning church service was incomplete without Communion being a part of it. Now, having waited so long, the experience seemed fresh and new, like the very first time over fifty years ago.

I didn't take photographs. But you can see the biscuits;

My husband makes them, to the recipe his mother used. I asked if he could make small ones as well, for me to have with morning coffee. So he did.

Noah's Ark; Hen and chickens

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not.

There are only a few windows left to open on the calendar.

We added hot cross buns and mini Easter eggs to this week's on-line order, and they arrived this morning. As did also an extra half-order due to a mix up. Our mix-up. We usually have next week's date booked and secured with a minimum order, and then go through adding and deleting as necessary, but if there are too many distraction during this process things can go wrong. So our fridge and freezer are overloaded with a week and a half's worth of food, and we sent our vicar on his way with our thanks, and some tomatoes, some lettuce and a pizza.

Tuesday 4th January - Waiting

I have a feeling of being suspended between one 'season' and the next. It's hard to explain; 

There was Advent, a time of preparation, 

and then there was Christmas, the main event. 

Then there were the days between Christmas and the New Year, when we took things quietly, looking at the Christmas presents, making the kits (on-going in the case of his complicated 'build a wooden clock' kit, chomping our way through tins of mince pies, Christmas cake, bowls of chocolates and snacks.

Now, this seems another suspended time, nearly but not quite back to 'normal'. I'm, not starting teaching until next week - it is always worth giving the school term a week to get under way, and the students a chance to do some emergency piano practice.

I'm actually looking forward to taking down the Christmas Tree this year in a few days time, because I have bought some Christmas Tree and ornament storage bags bags, and it is well past time that we went through all the bags and boxes and and bits and pieces of 'Christmas' that get jumbled together and put into the loft (or left lying around in the spare bedroom, as happened last year!). Some of the things needs to be kept, but a lot never come out from one year to the next. 

There's nothing like New Storage Boxes and Bags to making tidying up seem more fun! But not yet, I'll have to wait until Epiphany. The Christmas lights may stay a little longer - we'll see.

Last Spring, or maybe the one before, I replaced the wreath on the wall beside the front door with a sort of home-made basket of tete-a-tete daffodils. 

I found the net, and a bag of moss when I was clearing the shed back in the Summer, and seen where I can some pots like these on-line, so that will be one of today's tasks.

Thursday 5th December 2019 - The end is in sight

My teaching week sort of ends on Thursday, as Friday is supposed to be a non-teaching day apart from a djembe workshop which is fairly laid back.

That means that my teaching week sort of starts on Saturdays - simply because at the beginning of term the first official timetabled teaching is usually on the first Saturday.

I've been doing some counting.

How many sleeps until the start of the holidays? 16

How many sleeps until Christmas Day? 20

How many sleeps until I finish teaching for the year? only 9 or 11 - depends if I teach on Monday 16th or not. That's quite cheering!

How many lessons and workshops still to teach? 56 or 58 - not so cheering...

However, the days are speeding by;

Advent Christmas trees are accumulating along the garland

and this candle holder was a late birthday present from a good friend; the fifth of the Advent tealights flickering inside.

Thursday 28th January - A tourist in Limbo-Land

I feel as though I am in some kind of alternate universe. I keep going from one kind of limbo-land to another.

After my mother died on Saturday, and we had got over the initial reactions, there was nothing we could do until Monday. We entered a strange kind of "normal life" - going out for meals together, chatting. Other people were also at the pub, walking around, doing whatever, in their "normal lives". I wonder if any of them were like us, in a limbo-land?

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday were busy and empty by turns; collecting documents, making and going to appointments to register a death, make funeral arrangements, collecting her things from the Nursing Home... Moments of concentration and activity interspersed with... this and that.

I started teaching; a piano lesson on Monday, one of my classes  on Tuesday, more instrumental lessons yesterday and today.

And the emails! Oh, the emails! and the phone calls! oh, the phone calls! About half were all about family arrangements. The other half are work-related - dealing with the fall-out from cancelling lessons last week and this week, and confirming which lessons I will be teaching this week.

I'm in another limbo-land until Saturday, when we meet to decide the form the funeral service will take - what music, which readings and so on.

Then, I suppose, another week in a different limbo-land, when I go about normal life until the day of the funeral?

Part of the weird, dis-connected feeling I have must be due to the weird, dis-connected way I feel about my mother's death. When she had the major stroke, that was one "end-of-life-as-I-know-it" event. Everything changed, for all of the family in different ways. Then, when she became ill in November, everything changed again. Once she moved to the Nursing Home, it was always just a matter of time - days? weeks? months? sooner? later? who could tell? Her condition meant that aspiration pneumonia was always there in the background.

So. She was lively and "alive" all through the Christmas period, and then, quite suddenly, became ill, and sleepy, and drowsy, and asleep, and - gone., giving us all a few days to reconcile ourselves to the situation.

Here's a good poem: we may or may not use it at the funeral, but that doesn't matter. This kind of sums up how Friday and Saturday went.

     

Tuesday 1st December - Advent Calendar 1

I managed to wait until after breakfast before I got started on the Advent Calendars. Two old ones that get used every year, and my new Advent Cabinet of Surprises.

The first calendar is a mini calendar. It took a while to find the window (in the church, appropriately). Having opened it, I can't really make out the picture. A little person, maybe?

The second calendar is medium sized, and the window revealed a friendly looking dog.

Then I opened the first drawer - an Assam Teabag! Lovely! I'll take it to work with me; school tea lacks refinement.

 I'm saving the candle until this evening.

Monday 30th November - A New Year begins

Yesterday was the beginning of a New Year - the Church Year.

It was the first Sunday in Advent, and I really felt I OUGHT to be allowed to start on my Advent Calendars.

 Instead I've had to wait another two days.

That seems reasonable in some ways; Advent is a time of waiting. For Christians, we wait to celebrate an event that happened two thousand years ago; the Birth of Christ. Also for an event that is yet to come, when Christ "will come again in glory to judge the quick and the dead".

I was always confused about the word "quick". I was never a very fast runner at school. About death, there can be no confusion at all.

I wonder if I will manage to keep up with Advent this year? There were times last year when I "had" to eat five chocolates at once from the chocolate calendar because I had fallen behind with opening all the little windows, under the pressures of School Concerts, Christmas Preparations, everything that had to get done.

This year's candle is tall and thin, so it should manage to be consumed by Christmas. Last year's candle was cone-shaped, and in the end I used to light it every time we got together. I think it lasted until February. There was something quite pleasing about the ritual.

I like candles, especially Advent candles. They have a gentle, soothing quality. Like night-lights, sitting in a saucer of water, chasing away the dark.


I'll keep you posted as to how things go.