1. In my childhood, the nuns taught us the practice of observing the First Fridays to gain indulgences for our many sins and get into heaven pronto. So don't ask how that practice went....I just know that today is the first friday in lent, so it must be good for something by way of an indulgence.
2. I've been thinking a lot of my parents these days. Of how my Dad always went the extra mile during Lent. He not only followed the traditional fasting from food, but he also gave up drinking and smoking. No pre-dinner highballs. That's a lot of relaxation to bypass in the North Dakota winter. (And my brothers said it insured that the rest of us had something to offer up
during Lent, too.)
3. But my mom was a wonderful cook, and she had first rate ingredients to choose from: home grown vegetables from our victory garden, walleyed pike my dad caught through the ice on the lake, home-canned pheasant, home-made bread. My surviving brother, Paul, still raves about her pheasant in gravy over homemade biscuits. (Me, too. Food of the gods!) Mom never smoked, and she relaxed by doing tole painting--I still have a cutting board she decorated with a peasant girl.
4. Of the two of them, Mom was the least rigorous in her piety. Dad always led the rosary when they prayed it together, but she was very kind and tolerant of my dad's Irish temper. We kids set him off more than she ever did.
5. It's still wintry here, though the temp has never dipped below 0F yet. Hardly the "Arctic Blast" Fox weather trumpets. It's just the beginning of Lent, after all, and we know how that ends....in Easter and springtime!!
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