The Golden Ticket

It's been a while. Really, truly, to all three of you, I am sorry. Sometimes, I can;t find it in me to write about the minutiae of my life and nothing all that exciting is going on. We've had two birthdays, and about six illnesses, in the last month. Not what I had imagined you'd all want to read about. And anything else exciting usually happened in the midst of one of those illnesses when a limp whining, feverish child was occupying all of my personal space and preventing me from typing. On top of that, I had to get the girls' outgrown clothing and toys and prepare them for the local consignment sale. A task both frustrating, as I pin yet another diaper cover to yet another tiny dress, and melancholy, as my eyes well up over the same tiny dress that both Ruthie and Helen wore, once upon a time.
But today is a momentous occasion, folks. I have finally learned to do something I have been wanting to learn for years. And years. And years. This past Sunday was Palm Sunday...Sunday before Easter...loooong mass due to reading of the passion, palms are handed out to each attendee at Palm Sunday Mass. Ruthie and I each took a palm when we arrived at church. Ruthie went to the children's liturgy (a.k.a. church school) I told her to listen hard to her church scho teacher to fund out why we get palms. This was completely self-serving becasue I can't ever remember. (Carly...why do we get palms...don't they teach you that in choir?) Anyway, Ruthie came back with three more palms. And a little book about Easter and Jesus rising from the dead. No stories of why we have palms. But she came back with something better. So much better. Something I never dreamed they'd give her, because I thought it was illegal according to church rules. She came back with directions for turning her palms into a palm cross. Indeed folks, for years ands years, since I was a small child, I have seen people's palms miraculously turn into crosses. I never knew hoe they did this. I wold bring my palm home and try, but without the help of duct tape and staples, mine would unravel, and the duct tape really did add an element of modern crudeness to the whole thing. I gave up. I convinced myself that the church didn't want us decimating our palms. They were supposed to be treated with a certain respect. They were to be left on the kitchen table until they disappeared or turned into a pile of dust. Then they were to be swept into Daddy's ash tray. But here we were, being given the instructions. So it must be okay to make a cross form your palms. It must! I scanned the directions, and, realizing my husband's engineering degree might come in handy, packed them into out bag before we left for home. The consignment sale and some of the aforementioned illness kept me from attempting the crosses until this morning. But as I cleaned off the table, I realized U must do this before the directions, the palms, or both, got lost. So I sat down with all five palms, perhaps a bit drier than is ideal for palm making, and I began meticulously bending, folding and tucking. And I now have five beautiful palm crosses on the kitchen table. Don't ask me what I'm going to do with them. I don't know. Perhaps later I will take a picture, but I can't find my camera's USB cable, so even if I did I cannot currently post a picture. So just imagine how beautiful my crosses are. They are. So beautiful.