Lenten thoughts - Week 2

As I mentioned in my previous post, Connecticut doesn't seem to have the kind of winters I'm used to. However, this February has been pretty snowy. This past week has been really gray, cold, damp and wintery and at this writing, other than a few brief glimpses yesterday we haven't seen the sun in almost eight days, and the forecast is predicting the same for three more days. Not seeing the sun gets to people. Everywhere I go I hear laments like, "It's so COLD!" "When is it going to be spring?" "I'm ready for this to be over now." Maybe it's my puritan roots, but I have to admit that I actually like something about this kind of weather during Lent. Perhaps it's easier to be penitent when you're miserable about the weather. It certainly is more of a spiritual discipline to be hopeful in this kind of weather.



I didn't realize I felt this way until last year at this time, when Steve and I took a trip to San Francisco. We stayed with a friend who has a beautiful yard that was positively dripping with fragrant wisteria vines and other flowering trees - in early March! Along her driveway were citrus trees covered with little oranges and lemons. And the birds were singing like a choir from morning until night. The hills surrounding the city were an amazingly deep, rich green, and everywhere you looked was the evidence of botanical bounty, including the most amazing vegetable markets I've ever seen - filled to overflowing with LOCAL produce. Coming from gray, damp and cold New England, where the tomatoes in the stores not only overpriced but also hard and barely pink at this time of year and where the only local produce available is the now kind of soft butternut squash stored in the cellar since fall, San Francisco felt like the most abundant and rich place on earth to me. My first reaction was to be delighted. But my second thought was, "This just isn't right during Lent!"

I was to learn that the moist green-ness of the area would not last long. In just a month or two, the hills would turn what they euphamistically call "golden" (but which my friend calls dried-out brown.) New England is actually a far more consistently moist and lush region year round, rich with natural springs and rivers and lakes, while California suffers from droughts every year. Knowing this at least appeased my green envy.



Everything in life has its own costs and benefits, as does every region, I guess. But I'll take Lent in the late New England winter any day, when the sky is often gray and the ground, when it shows, is damp, matted down and dirty, like a used dishcloth in need of a good laundering. The only breaks we get are the breathtakingly beautiful snows like the one we got this weekend that frost the trees with magical beauty. Too bad it all needs to be shovelled.

I once visted Key West for a few weeks, and I noticed how relaxed and happy everyone seemed to be all the time. I realized that their mood was definitely linked to the weather. I mean, how can you not be laid back when all you need to throw on is a pair of shorts, a Hawaiian shirt and flip flops? The colder the climate, the more tense the population seems to be. I have noticed this as a trend in my travels. People from cold climates tend to be viewed by others as being rather crusty, distant people - somehow especially New Englanders. Perhaps we retain some of the European reserve along with our cold climate temperament. We, like many cold weather people, don't let many of our feelings out - maybe we keep them inside in an attempt to conserve energy!

But our challenging climate attunes us to the seasonal changes around us. We can smell when snow is coming, and we can recognize the healing fragrance of spring earth - sometimes even when it's still covered in snow. Our ears pick up the first bird songs that are so welcome after the muffled silence of winter, that tease us into believing that spring must be just around the corner when we know it really isn't. What can possibly compare to that first warm day in the spring when you don't need to wear a coat and the sun feels warm on your neck? People in Key West don't get to have these experiences. It seems to me they must have to try a lot harder to believe in the resurection. Up here we travel through the somber Lenten journey in our very bones, and this makes Easter all the more welcome and all the more miraculous. Every year we physically feel salvation.