Reflections on Jordanville

As of tomorrow evening, I will have been back a week from my annual effort to polish my meager musical talents.  This year, I was especially eager to focus on a slightly different aspect of Orthodox worship:  the Church Slavonic language that was especially formulated for worshipping God, in the Slavic tradition.  As the instructor of that course pointed out, the beauty of using a liturgical language like Slavonic is that there are no curse words in Slavonic (other than the curses in the Psalms, presumably), so it is completely suited to addressing God and talking about Him.

Well, I took the third-year course and didn’t pass it, which isn’t too discouraging, considering that I took four swipes at the first-year course before I passed that.  The “trouble” with these courses is that they are designed to address the needs of someone who reads this language on a weekly basis, and needs to be familiar with the grammar of what he’s looking at so that he knows how to read it.  That isn’t my situation at all; I just want to have passed the course, and to be able to read/sing the funeral service, should we ever have another Russian funeral in our parish.

However, the beauty of Jordanville is that there are always extra snippets that come my way.  Last year, there were fewer than usual, and so this year, the balance was restored; it felt as if I was running smack into grace every time I turned around.

There was the young woman (32 years old) who was literally dying of cancer, who had just begun her second round of chemotherapy.  So, doesn’t chemo cure cancer?  Not always, and in her case, definitely not — at this point — she has peritoneal cancer, which so far is always fatal, and this is her second bout with it.  She told me that had it not been for the intercessions of St. John of San Francisco, she should have been dead three years ago.  And she talked about all the blessings that had come her way because of her disease. Can you picture talking about cancer in terms of a blessing?! I would feel as if I were betraying a confidence if I mentioned them here, so I won’t, but the peace on her face, and the smiles she had for everyone, were more than remarkable; they were like a benediction from God Himself.  This is a girl completely aware of, and completely in acceptance of, her limited time on earth.

Then there was the bonus class — no extra credit, just extra proficiency — in reading Church Slavonic aloud.  This was the course I really wanted, and the monk who taught it was very aware of my goals.  Nevertheless, we would get sidetracked from actual reading into actual theology, and at one point, he mentioned that one Christmas, he and his brothers stopped in to visit the man who had been choir director of their parish, to say goodbye to him:  He was dying of cancer.  When they got to his house, the man’s wife said, “Don’t mention anything about cancer or dying to him; you know, Christmas and all that.”  So these guys get in to see their former choir director, and the first thing they say is, “You’re not looking so bad, considering what’s going on.”  “And the man started crying,” said the monk.  “He was so grateful to be able to talk to somebody about what it was like to be dying.  Christmas and all the festivities and all the carols and all that stuff had no reality for him.  What was real was facing his own imminent meeting with his God.”

OK, I don’t need to go into how I feel about all of this.  If you don’t know by now, you haven’t been reading my blog for very long.  So when I got home, I e-mailed this monk to ask him:  What’s better, to use any means to prolong life, or to accept that it’s at an end and prepare for death?  And he answered, God bless him, exactly as I had hoped he would:  That we do need to take care of our life in the ordinary way, not take ridiculous risks, eat healthy, and all that stuff, but that when serious disease like cancer strikes, we need to decide what we want:  Do we want more time for repentance, or are we able to come to grips with our mortality and go from there?  Phew, what a relief that somebody can grasp the real question and answer it!!

The young woman, by the way, is married (no children — thank God for small blessings).  Her husband is a deacon, preparing to spend the rest of his life as a monk.  What was so remarkable about this couple is that this obviously not the life they had planned for; but they are able to accept it as God’s very clear laying out of their path, and are planning the rest of their lives with this direction in mind.  Phenomenal blessings, this trip!  More in my next post.

15 Books

Cribbed from Philippa’s blog:

The rules:  Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.   This list is in no particular order.

1. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
2. The Deliverance of Sister Cecilia, as told to William Brinkley
3. Firefox, by Craig Thomas (?) — the inspiration for my own books
4. The Black Marble, by Joseph Wambaugh — ditto
5. The Mountain of Silence, by Kyriacos C. Markides
6. Gifts of the Desert, ditto
7. Father Arseny, translated by Vera Bouteneff
8. A Cloud of Witnesses, the followup to Father Arseny
9. The Apple Orchard Mystery, the first mystery I ever read — I was seven, and it started my love affair with mystery stories
10. Winnie the Pooh, by A. A. Milne — I can’t believe my mother thought these books were stupid.  I loved them.
11. The Church Mice series, by Graham Oakley — the only children’s books I’ve ever read that were just as entertaining for adults as they were for children, mostly due to the riotous puns in the illustrations (“Fleece & Guyle, Realtors,” anyone??).
12. Night Fall, by Nelson DeMille — the whole book takes place in scenes I’ve known all my life, begins with the mystery of a jet that blew up just after taking off from Kennedy Airport, and ends with a chilling conclusion at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
13. The Stork’s Nest, by Laura Lynn Williams.  As the subtitle says, Life and Love in the Russian Countryside.
14. A Prologue to Love, by Taylor Caldwell.
15. Well — I may as well admit it — the Unorthodox series, by yours truly.  I can’t think of any book that will always stay with me more than the one(s) I wrote myself.

Off to Jordanville tomorrow, hoping to finish the one course I never was able to get a handle on, till the year before last:  Church Slavonic.  I don’t know if I will be finishing this course this year, since I don’t know if I passed last year’s course (that instructor was going through a radical life change, from college professor to monastic, and I don’t know if he ever got his grades in for anybody).

I hate travel.  I hate the uproar of having to tie up all the loose ends of my life before leaving, I hate being away from home — especially now that there’s no one else in the house for my husband to be with — and the accommodations are, at best, monastic, which wouldn’t be a problem if you were only staying for three days, which is what they were originally designed for.  But for two weeks, I’d really like a shower that I don’t have to worry about the water turning scalding hot every time someone uses the toilet.

But once I’m there, discounting the evergreen adventure of the monastery guesthouse, it’s pure heaven.  Keep us in your prayers, as my dh will be traveling home by himself and, in two weeks’ time, returning by himself to collect me.  I don’t know why he does this to himself, but I appreciate it.

A Writer’s Life

I think most readers of this blog know that among other things, I write novels.  They started out, 30 years ago, as a way for me to explore Russian culture and to combine my own (sketchy) Russian heritage with something very dear to my heart at the time:  federal law enforcement, which I had just left three years earlier when my daughter was born.

Well, the characters in that first book have taken on an entire life of their own since I became Orthodox — 18 years ago, now — and I found that just writing about their little Cold-War romance wasn’t enough.  Now they’re married, they have kids, they’ve become enmeshed in international intrigue — it turns out that my hero’s father was spying for the CIA.  And his wife knew about it.  And never told him.  And he’s in internal-affairs, that organ of any police agency charged with investigating police officers accused of crimes.  (When this whole thing started, my own career with internal affairs had just ended, so there was no way my hero was going to be involved in any other aspect of law enforcement!)

So:  You’re in the KGB, your wife is an American, the only reason she is allowed to be your wife is that you’ve been charged with uncovering her secret mission to Russia, and you learn that your own father’s been knifing you in the back for years — and your wife, whom you have come to love profoundly, knew about it.  And never told you.  How are you going to react??

I don’t know.

So, although this particular scenario takes place between 1985 and 1988, long before the internet became one of life’s minor essentials, my heroine has begun keeping a blog.  In Russian.  About what her life is like, with a hostile husband, his distraught mother, and their four children, in a foreign country, where she is under investigation as a spy (which she isn’t).  My hope is that through her blog, I can get inside her husband’s head, and be able to write convincingly about his reactions to all of this.

(Oh, side benefit:  maybe I’ll finally learn how to type on a Russian keyboard.  It’s slow going, so far.)

Sheesh, the things we do for our characters…

My Goodness!!

There’s this thing out there that I only became aware of this year, called Eastern Christian New Media Awards (that is “new,” not “news” — I checked), wherein people nominate their favorite blogs in such things as Funniest Blogs, Best Theology Blog, and Best Domestic Blog — all, of course, from the viewpoint of an Eastern Orthodox life.  A friend of mine posted about it, so I checked it out and voted for some of my favorite blogs — there were at least three that I would have liked to vote for in the Domestic category, but you could only vote for one.  Phooey.  However, I can and will mention that two of the Domestic blogs I would have liked to vote for, on one and the same ballot, are Mimi’s blog and Philippa’s blog.

With competition like these ladies, imagine my shock when I saw my own blog among them.  /jaw hanging open, eyes wide, drool f orming at the corner of my mouth/  OK, that last is a bit gross, but you get the idea.  Whoever nominated Muttonings, thank you!! Winning isn’t remotely on my radar scope, but I’d love to know how many votes I got.

And that’s all I have to say on the subject.  For someone who’s supposed to be a writer, this is not good.  But that’s how stunned I am.

(Oh, one final, purely domestic note:  I got the rest of my windows washed over Memorial Day weekend.  Thank God for my son, who took down all the curtains on the remaining windows and put them back up for me.  Washing the windows themselves wasn’t a problem because they’re all tilt-ins, but I wasn’t looking forward to the stepstool routine — and my son saved me from that.  God bless you, Chris!)

More about Laundry

I got as much a charge out of reading everyone’s “clothesline” comments as I did out of the original post!  Philippa made a comment about “laundry trees,” so I thought I’d elaborate a bit more on that topic.

I use a “laundry tree” all winter long.  (I love this term, by the way, since it actually describes the contraption I currently have.)  I used to use a “butterfly rack,” which had “wings” that unfolded and could be supported by brackets, all of which supported one washload; that lasted me for many years, till my grandson decided to use it as a jungle gym.  (He was about two at the time.)  At that point I went looking online for a substitute, and found this laundry tree at Williams-Sonoma.  I must have gotten the last one, because it’s no longer featured.  (Silly people.)

Anyway, the “tree” supports one full load of laundry.  It’s about six feet high, which means the top racks are taller than I am, and I have to stretch to reach them; but what I especially like about this “tree” is that I can hang sheets from it, if they are folded in fourths, so for the first time ever, I can hang all my laundry off this thing.  Winter or summer, I do one load a day, though when the kids were home, I sometimes upped that to two loads.

When I do whites, I put all the “unmentionables” on the inside (I’m just that old-fashioned about underwear), and things like T-shirts and sweatshirts on the outside, so everything in between is covered over nicely.  The rack actually stands in my kitchen, behind the kitchen table; people who know me know about my “idiot-syncrasies,” and those who don’t — well, if you object, don’t come visiting.

Always an early riser, I’d have my washing on the line (or the rack) by 8:30 am the latest; when I got a job that began at 8:00 am, I just got up earlier and put my laundry on first thing.  Last year, I got hit with a double whammy:  more abdominal surgery, which meant that I couldn’t lift more than five pounds at once, and the Summer-That-Wasn’t, which all of us in the Northeast remember:  That was the year that Mother Nature confused us with the Pacific Northwest, so we got all their rain, and they got all our heat.  I think it rained throughout June, July, and August, except (of course) for the two weeks I was at the Summer School in Jordanville.

Anyway, under those two constrictions, and with no electric or gas dryer, I was forced to hang laundry on the laundry tree in the kitchen, and discovered, to my amazement — that it dried just fine.  Took a little longer than in the winter — in the winter, because the heating system dries the house out so much, things can be dry in six to eight hours — but every 24 hours, I was able to fold dry stuff and hang out more wet stuff.

So I am completely liberated from slavery to a dryer and its attendant horrors, like remembering to clean out the lint filter from time to time.  I don’t know what I’ll do when I get too old to hang out laundry.  Probably just go into assisted living….   

More About Clotheslines

I’ve done enough ranting about clotheslines that a good friend sent me this via e-mail. I have her permission to post it here.

Another friend to whom I sent this, who grew up some ten miles away from me (but Brooklyn is like a foreign country, if you’re from Queens) wrote back and said, “This brought back so many memories!” But I bet one of them wasn’t of our mothers washing the line before they hung out the clothes — with lines that could only be strung either from the back porch to a pole at the very back of a minuscule yard, or actually hung between buildings, trying to wash the line would have been suicidal.

THE BASIC RULES FOR CLOTHESLINES (if you don’t know what clotheslines are, better skip this):

1. You had to wash the clothes line before hanging any clothes–walk the entire length of each line with a damp cloth around the lines…

2. You had to hang the clothes in a certain order, and always hang “whites” with “whites,” and hang them first.

3. You never hung a shirt by the shoulders – always by the tail! What would the neighbors think?

4. Wash day on a Monday! . . . Never hang clothes on the weekend, or Sunday, for Heaven’s sake!

5. Hang the sheets and towels on the outside lines so you could hide your “Unmentionables” in the middle (perverts & busybodies, ya know!)

(Another NYC note: Not really possible with one or two lines strung out from the back porch–it was acceptable to hang out men’s unmentionables, but women’s were always dried on a rack in the bathtub.)

6. It didn’t matter if it was sub zero weather . . . Clothes would “Freeze-dry.”

(And indeed they did! Something I discovered early on was that if I left my wash out for a couple of days, eventually it would thaw enough that it actually dried, and the softness was incredible.)

7. Always gather the clothes pins when taking down dry clothes! Pins left on the lines were “tacky!”

(My mother-in-law always left her pins on the lines, and my husband still does. What that’s about, I don’t know.)

8. If you were efficient, you would line the clothes up so that each item did not need two clothes pins, but shared one of the clothes pins with the next washed item.

(Still do that–even with just two of us in the house!)

9. Clothes off of the line before dinner time, neatly folded in the clothes basket, and ready to be ironed.

(Is there any other way?!)

10. IRONED? Well, that’s a whole other subject!

A POEM

A clothesline was a news forecast to neighbors passing by.

There were no secrets you could keep when clothes were hung to dry.

It also was a friendly link, for neighbors always knew

If company had stopped on by to spend a night or two.

For then you’d see the “fancy sheets” and towels upon the line;

You’d see the “company table cloths” with intricate designs.

The line announced a baby’s birth from folks who lived inside -

As brand new infant clothes were hung out carefully with pride!

The ages of the children could readily be known

By watching how the sizes changed, you’d know how much they’d grown!

It also told when illness struck, as extra sheets were hung;

Then nightclothes, and a bathrobe, too, haphazardly were strung.

It also said, “Gone on vacation now” when lines hung limp and bare.

It told, “We’re back!” when full lines sagged with not an inch to spare!

New folks in town were scorned upon if wash was dingy and gray,

As neighbors carefully raised their brows, and looked the other way ….

But clotheslines now are of the past, for dryers make work much less.

Now what goes on inside a home is anybody’s guess!

I really miss that way of life.   It was a friendly sign

When neighbors knew each other best by what hung on the line!

Amen to that!

New York, New Yooooooooork!

That’s what it sounds like outside my little New Hampshire home.  It’s been sirens all evening.  Last Friday, the girl who lives across the street had a royal screaming match with her ex-boyfriend, both drunk as skunks, with the f-word in liberal evidence.  Two weeks ago, we had a guy screaming at his girlfriend (same house, different couple), “ROCK-SAAAYYYYYYY!!!!!  OPEN THE F*** UP!!!!!!!!” and repeatedly battering the door.  I don’t know how it ever stood up to his pounding.  (The irony was that the girl was out walking her dog, and came back to this penny opera.)  Then there are the motorcycles from the biker bar around the corner.  There’s a muffler law in this city, but you’d never know it.

When we lived in New York, the Long Island Expressway was a stone’s throw away from our kitchen windows.  The swish of traffic was ceaseless.  It was quietest at 3:00 am, but you could still hear that swish.  And it was still quieter than “quiet little rural New Hampshire.”  Sigh.  When we moved up here, we could hear cows across the highway at 5:30 am.  Haven’t heard them in at least 15 years — people are on the road at 4:00, on their way down to the Big City (Boston).  My husband is one of them!

I don’t like gratuitous change.  I don’t like people moving up here for the “tax advantages” (no sales tax or state income tax), and although an income tax is anathema to most New Hampshirites, I’ve been known to say I favor it because maybe it will keep the Massachusetts folks from moving up — and they reluctantly agree.  They don’t like the way this area is changing, either.

Meanwhile, I see I’m down by three subscribers on Bloglines.  Well, I know I lead a quiet, boring weblife, but still.  <sniff>

Update

Thanks to all for Happy Anniversary wishes.  I just thought you’d all get a kick out of knowing how we actually spent the day.

After church we headed out to the coast of Maine.  Some years ago — both kids were still living at home — we had lunch at a very nice restaurant right on the coast, next to a lighthouse.  It was a grey, rainy day, so the surf was up, and smashing against the rocks right in front of the restaurant — it was just a great place.  Forty years is a pretty big deal, and I asked Himself if we could go there again.

The restaurant is no longer there.  In fact, there is no sign that it was ever there.

So we spent the next two hours driving up and down the Maine coast, looking for a nice romantic spot.  Now, keep in mind that I have not had breakfast, either, since I wanted to receive Communion, so I’m about to faint from hunger — but we both wanted some place with good food and good atmosphere.  Finally, around 2:30, Himself says, “The heck with it — let’s just go to that ’50s diner out by Sunshine!”

“That ’50s diner” is the kind of place that was everywhere 50 years ago.  Chrome chairs with those tacky bright-red plastic seat covers that ripped hopelessly the second they came into contact with a child’s shoe buckle.  Chrome tables topped with formica, into which had been baked futuristic science-fiction emblems like starbursts and rocket ships.  Booths covered in that same tacky red plastic.  It even has a jukebox that plays stuff from the ’50s (and ’60s).

That’s where we had dinner.  Well, the food was good, anyway.  Ah, romance!

I DON’T BELIEVE IT

Forty years.

We hear about the people of Israel wandering in the desert for forty years and think, “Holy cow, how did they ever stand it?!”  Think about it — a baby born at the beginning of that journey would be middle-aged (by today’s standards!) by the time it was over.

For that matter, think about how the average human changes between birth and forty years of age.

That’s how long we’ve been married.

Yep, Himself and I celebrate our fortieth year of wedded bliss tomorrow.  Now, I must be honest and note that I don’t know if Himself would agree about the “wedded bliss” part, but I don’t think he would necessarily disagree:  I’m recalling the night we were watching TV and something came up about marriage (probably an ad), and I turned to him and said, “Well, we’ve been married long enough.”  Pause.  “No, not long enough,” I added, as if it were a revelation, and he said, “I was just thinking the same thing.”  When it’s good, there is no “long enough.”

So, in the same sense that Liturgy is an action that takes place outside of Time, in Kairos not Chronos, that makes our wedding day a day outside of time, too — I want this to go on forever.  May God grant it so!

Let the Sun Shine In

Today, I washed my windows for the first time in five years.

I take no responsibility for this execrable lapse.  Five years ago, the city decided to dig up a perfectly usable main street — the one in front of our house — and repave it.  Mind you, in this city there are streets that haven’t been redone in the nearly twenty-four years we’ve lived here, and they look it.  (And feel it.)  There was nothing remarkably wrong with Main Street:  no potholes, few cracks, and if there was no curbing between sidewalk and road, well, welcome to New Hampshire.  In this state, that’s the norm.  Heck, we still have dirt roads.

But no, Main Street had to be paved, so paved it was.  Dug down to the bedrock, new sewer pipes installed, re-gravelled, re-hot-topped, smoothed down, curbing and drainage installed — it’s gorgeous to walk on.  But the project took two years, and you must admit that anyone crazy enough to open the windows when the main drag through town consists of dirt is more than crazy enough.

Then there was 2006.  We all know what happened that year.  Well, yes, the surgery took place in August, so theoretically I could have washed my windows in May, except that that was one of those times when it rained through most of May and June, and a good bit of July, too.

I was still recuperating in 2007 (another exceptionally rainy year, with record flooding in this state).  And last year I had more surgery.  Let me tell you, I was already reluctant to look out the windows in 2006, and by last year I would cringe every time I tried to peer through the film of grit and grime.

So here we are, a sunny Saturday in May, temperatures just right for working out of doors and — most importantly — for hanging the curtains out to dry.  So promptly at 9:00 a.m., I set to work, and worked straight through till noon.

Only one problem.  There are only three windows done.  The problem now is that, after two surgeries, climbing onto a stepstool to take down the curtains is unbelievably difficult.  Moving the furniture that’s in front of the windows, which before I would have done without batting an eyelash — also not to be risked, now that I have a hernia thanks to the doctor who’d rather go on vacation than hang around to make sure her patient was recuperating well.  (I mean, she could have postponed the surgery for three weeks, ya think?!)

But those windows are sparkling, and the curtains have that fresh, outdoorsy smell that you only get with line-dried laundry.  I really hope this weather holds for a couple more weeks.  I mean, I know we need rain, and like most folks in this part of the world, I hope we get a few nice showers in between our sunny days.  I just hope they fall on days when I have to work.