Post-Easter-Post

Today at church I heard a great children's sermon.  The regular sermon was good too, but I was struck by the children's sermon because the pastor did something I hadn't seen before. He told the kids he was going to talk to them about God's love, and sharing their faith.  And he proceeded to show them a sheet of paper on which he had printed, many times, the words "God's Love":

He asked the kids to count the corners on the paper (four, naturally) then pulled out a pair of "Sunday School scissors"..

...and proceeded to cut off a corner of the paper to share God's Love with one of the kids. He then asked them how many corners he had left - they said three. But of course, when he counted, he had three he had started with, plus two corners he had created by cutting off the fourth corner - so five corners. He got up to 10 corners by sharing God's Love, and he also showed the girl who took the first corner that she now had 3 corners, and when she shared with a neighbor, each of them had three corners. A great illustration, I thought.

A few other post-Easter thoughts - I spent Good Friday in St. Andrews, and it was an absolutely gorgeous day.  Between that day and sunny days in Dundee,  I have been taking a ton of pictures, some Easter-related, and some just arty.  A few of the more Easter-related are below. 

Churchyard, St. Peter's Free Church, Dundee	St. Peter's Free Church, Dundee
Church door in St. Andrews	St. Peters sign, Dundee
Dandelions on the tops of her shoes	Daisy Trinity
St. Andrews Cathedral	Exiting St. Andrews Cathedral toward North St.
Walking on Water...almost	Church on the Dundee-St. Andrews road with graveyard tumbling  down the hill

Happy Anniversary, Pat and Phil!

Eleven years ago today, my husband Paul and I went on our fourth date.  I'm usually pretty bad at remembering details, but I can tell you with certainty what we did on our first four dates, eleven years ago.

Our first date was two Tucson's Fourth Avenue Street Fair.  During that date, Paul started ranting about the idiocy of people who insisted on having grassy lawns in drought-stricken Tucson, and I was hooked.

Our second date, we went to see a horrible movie, which somehow managed to garner critical acclaim - Gangs of New York.  On this date, Paul's loathing of Leonardo di Caprio was solidified, and we bonded not only over the horribleness of Gangs of New York, but also our mutual dislike for The English Patient, another critically acclaimed movie that perhaps two people in the whole US were willing to admit they disliked...and they were now on a date together.

Our third date, I invited Paul to go on the Medical Anthropology overnight camping trip to Patagonia, AZ. He gained major points not only by knowing how to put up our tent (I had borrowed it from my roommate and had no idea what to do with it) but also by making s'mores for my friends and making charming small talk with total strangers.

Which brought us to April 20, 2003, our fourth date.  Which happened to be both Easter Sunday, and my future in-laws 35th wedding anniversary. And the first time I had met anyone in Paul's family. Talk about your nerve-wracking scenarios. 

But it turned out to be lovely. Paul's parents are wonderful folks, and his brother and sister-in-law made me feel welcome, too. His nieces and nephew were just kids, 10 and 11 - now they're in in their early 20's. The food was great, and conversation flowed easily. There was an awkward moment around pictures - his parents took one of Paul and I (which I think is now packed away in a storage space in Virginia - at least I hope it is, since it didn't make it to Scotland with us) but of course I wasn't in any of the other photos, but who knew if I was going to be around another week, a month, a year? It was only our fourth date.

But, eleven years later, I have not only married Pat and Phil's youngest son, but have also taken himto Rhode Island for three years, and now Scotland for two. Part of his heart will always be in Tucson, though, with Pat, Phil, and the rest of the Orzechs. So Happy Anniversary, Pat and Phil, and we'll see you in Tucson as soon as we can!

  

Preparing for Easter in Scotland

Today is Easter, but I started to think about preparing for it a few weeks ago.  I know, I'm supposed to have been reflecting on Easter for all of Lent, but my earnest concern about Easter traditions only started a little prior to Palm Sunday.   Thinking about Palm Sunday made me miss Central Congregational Church in Providence, and all their Palm Sunday celebrations - waving palms, procession with a teenager plying Jesus, and even Jasper the donkey. Last week at Palm Sunday here, I ended up working in the creche (nursery) during church, so I couldn't be sure about the palm-waving, but there was definitely no donkey. I saw small palm branches woven into crosses (pre-woven, not even a palm leaf to weave yourself, or teach your kids how to make the cross out of it).

For Easter itself, I thought about the American traditions, and then ran into Scottish roadblocks:

1) Dyeing eggs. Okay, didn't even really anticipate this one: almost all eggs in the US are white, right. you could get brown eggs if you wanted, but they're not as common. Not so here.  Eggs are uniformly brown. No white eggs to be found, even in a big store. So how do you dye eggs when they are all brown? I asked Paul to get stickers, so we sticker-ed our eggs this year:

 

2) Hunting for (plastic) eggs hidden by the Easter Bunny.  Okay, we were doing better on this one. The trickiest part was the plastic eggs (which Paul found and bought, although he lamented the whole time the three dozen plastic eggs we had left in the storage space in Virginia).  But Easter candy was plentiful - gummy bunnies (Haribo has a monopoly over here on gummy things), Cadbury mini-eggs (not the creme eggs although those are also everywhere), jellybeans - and we have a garden (yard) for hiding eggs.  So what if the Scottish neighbors thought we were a bit nuts, yelling "Eggs!" and hiding and re-hiding them in the garden between 9 and 10 am (see video clip below). We didn't find any bit Easter Egg hunts (like at church in Providence).  The one thing we did discover was a Scottish penchant for egg-rolling. At school, Audrey's teacher and classmates told her she had to roll a big egg down a hill, "like rolling the stone away from the grave" on Eastern Sunday morning. And some friends of ours did plan to go egg-rolling first thing (like 8 am) on Easter. We have the big plastic egg that the 36 small plastic eggs came in, so we thought we might roll that down the hill...but at church, a girl (8 or 9 years old) came up to me to ask if Audrey wanted to roll her (Cadbury chocolate) egg down the hill with her.  I said sure, and later Audrey told me that they had rolled an egg for the girls and an egg for the boys, and when they rolled down the hill, guess what, they broke, and she got to eat 3 pieces of chocolate...so maybe this is the point :-) 

3) Eat peeps. This is really more of a my-father Easter tradition, but with two marshmallow-loving kids, it seems like a good tradition to uphold.  Except there are no peeps in Scotland. Cadbury has a virtual lock on the market, and they don't make peeps. At church I found pink marshmallow bunnies, but it wasn't the same. No chicks. No sparkly sugar. Just not the same!

Enough for now - off to roll the plastic egg down the hill, which Audrey is currently taping with scotch tape (sellotape, here) so that it will be able to survive its rolling journey in one piece!

Blog bonus: Here is the 30-second video of her rolling the egg. Tried to put it on Facebook but it came up as a black screen (audio but no video) every time...