Sunday, March 20, 2005

Halley is talking about some things today and as I read them I had that, "hey! I've done that too!" feeling. One of the things she talks about is the Palm Sunday church service. She describes it from a view she has outside the church on one of those long winter just turned to spring days. The kind where there are still plenty of reminders of the long hard winter that has been and sometimes may still yet to be even when the calendar says that it is officially Spring. My last winter in the Chicago area was one of those. We suffered the indignity of an April Fools day blizzard that year. Those early springs are ones that are filled with more hope for spring than actual spring. She describes the effects of the big piles of snow that keep holding on even though the weather is warm enough to melt most of it. These piles of grey and dirty reminders of the deepest the winter had been able to force us to dig to make our way through our daily tasks. It forces our normally neat and organized lives to become more random and different. The normal nicely arranged lines of cars parked in the lot outside the church turn into a wild looking scene of cars parked in all manner of different angles and arrangments, none of which seem to have any organization to them. She also talks about plam fronds and the rituals of the Palm Sunday services. I remember as a child going to Palm Sunday services. They were one of my favorites for some of the same reasons I just described above. They were different from the normal services. We dressed different, there were those special hats the ladies wore, the practice of handing out the palm fronds. For a young child these palm fronds are almost like simple toys. Something to play with. I would try to imagine where all these palm fronds came from. Were there palm farms somewhere? How did they grow them in the winter when it was so cold and miserable? I undserstand now where all those palm fronds come from :) She talks about driving behind a large vehicle and not being able to see the road ahead. I have on occasion become so frustrated that I would do as Halley did and try to pass just to feel more comfortable and safe being able to see the road and traffic ahead. I have also done the opposite and done my best to drive a little slower to allow more of the road ahead to move from in front of the big vehicle in front of me to to behind it. I have also on occasion purposely tried to stop at a light that the big vehicle was able to go through just to take me out of that situation. I drive different than I used to now. Finally the thing that Halley talked about the really gave me the "I've done that feeling" is when she stops to take some time to cry. Although I have to admit, as I have heard from many other widow and widowers, that we do some of our best crying in the car rather than out. In the first months I would never have been able to go anywhere if I couldn't cry and drive. The car was about the only place that I could feel alone with my feelings. It was also the only place where I had the time to think about things. The rest of my days were spent trying to be a single parent of two girls working full time. And as Halley says crying is one of the best ways to release. Those first few months were filled with so much emotion that it felt like at times we were exploding. Long hard crying sessions were the only way I could find to release them. There is such a feeling of calm and release once I was done. Years later I sometimes long for those days of emotion. 11:58:15 AM

© Copyright 2006 Rod Kratochwill.