All posts by GretchenJoanna

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About GretchenJoanna

Orthodox Christian, widowed in 2015; mother, grandmother. Love to read, garden, cook, write letters and a hundred other home-making activities.

Saving the mystery women.

history, women,

Last year I spent quite a few hours sorting through photos of several generations of ancestors, my late husband’s family and mine, plus those of our own immediate family, children and grandchildren. I barely made a dent in the collections!

My husband’s family seems to have taken more photographs of their relations, and saved many more than people on my side have done. And while my siblings keep and store some of our relatives’ pictures, I am the sole curator of those that were passed to us from my in-laws and their in-laws, and so forth.

It wasn’t too hard to find at least a thousand pictures that could be put in the trash. It pains me to say that, because an image of a human made in the image of God feels like it retains something of the holiness of that connection, and it doesn’t seem right to be disrespectful of it. That shows that I come from a generation before digital images. I discard those with abandon.

Many that I tossed, however, were of such poor quality that I couldn’t see the faces, and quite a few were superfluous, because of there being much better or identical pictures of those people in existence. I have many more to purge, hopefully this year, but I have sifted through the oldest ones.

Among the boxes of pictures coming from my husband’s family, the third category that I needed to discard was this: Women who were unidentified, and did not match any pictures of known relations. Yes, there were also some mystery men, but they did not impress me in any way. Most didn’t look composed, or handsome. I felt differently about the women, I suppose because I am a woman.

Were they distant cousins? College friends? Maiden aunts? No one in my family knew them, no one cares about them. They all sleep in death. But — I did care about them. A hundred years ago they meant something to someone in our family, and since it is so easy to save digital images, I laid their paper pictures out on the carpet and took group photos.

I hope that each of them is known by name by someone somewhere, friends or descendants who have copies of these photos that that they won’t throw in the trash for a while yet. My curiosity about them is curious, these who represent thousands and billions who no longer walk the earth, most of whom never had their picture taken. But even if they are all forgotten by us living humans, God does know about them. And I, briefly, knew them ever so slightly….

They come with us to Candlemas.

feasts, poetry, ,

CANDLEMAS

They came, as called, according to the Law.
Though they were poor and had to keep things simple,
They moved in grace, in quietness, in awe,
For God was coming with them to His temple.
Amidst the outer court’s commercial bustle
They’d waited hours, enduring shouts and shoves,
Buyers and sellers, sensing one more hustle,
Had made a killing on the two young doves.
They come at last with us to Candlemas
And keep the day the prophecies came true
We glimpse with them, amidst our busyness,
The peace that Simeon and Anna knew.
For Candlemas still keeps His kindled light,
Against the dark our Saviour’s face is bright.

-Malcolm Guite

Would you like to hear the poet read his sonnet? Click here: “A Sonnet for Candlemas.”

The purples are out.

my garden, play, winter, , ,

Cold weather has returned with the sunshine, and the fountain was frozen this morning. I have two little girls here all day making good use of my toys and the playhouse. It’s interesting to see the teamwork of these females in making a home of the playhouse. The typical use that my mostly boy grandchildren make of it revolves around “cooking” with whatever they can find, but my guests requested blankets and pillows and stuffies, and they created a cozy nest. It was cold enough that they needed their puffy jackets, but they asked to go barefoot.

Up at Pippin’s place where the temperatures were a little colder midday, 40 degrees, my grandchildren chose to eat lunch outdoors:

In my garden, the rain and sun combined to bring out — the flowers! Well, a few flowers… the purple, ground-hugging sort so far. But I see some taller iris buds. In February things will start to get exciting!

A quiet light to himself.

humanity, poetry, quotes, winter, , , , , ,
Donald Sheehan

Some years ago Donald Sheehan’s widow Xenia shared on social media an excerpt from his book The Grace of Incorruption, a passage in which he links Robert Frost with St. Dionysius. She published it on the saint’s feast day in October, along with his icon below, but for re-posting Sheehan’s thoughts I have chosen today’s date, on which Robert Frost breathed his last, an appropriately wintry day in 1963. Xenia Sheehan: 

This day the Orthodox Church celebrates St. Dionysius the Areopagite, 1st (or possibly 5th)-century poet of “Mystical Theology,” whom Donald Sheehan uniquely compares to American poet Robert Frost in his “deliberate turning out of all the lights of false knowing . . . in order to behold — in Dionysius’ astonishing words — ‘that darkness concealed from all the light among beings.'”

Don writes in The Grace of Incorruption that,

“…in order to know the personhood of another, we must unknow both the persona and the personality: we must let these lights go out. Again and again, in his finest poems, Robert Frost accomplishes precisely this unknowing, the deliberate extinguishing of all the false light, and a welcoming-in of the darkness in which true personhood can shine forth. And true personhood is, always, genuinely beautiful.

“I think what moves us so deeply about the poem ‘An Old Man’s Winter Night’ is Frost’s evocation of genuine personhood in the old man. The old man in Frost’s poem is not a persona nor a personality; he is, genuinely, a person. And as the lights go out in the poem, the more beautifully and movingly his personhood emerges. One vivid detail: when the log in the stove shifts with a jolt, we, too, are jolted into a deeper intimacy with the old man, an intimacy that gains in power because of the darkness.”

-Donald Sheehan

Text and icon from Donald’s widow Xenia Sheehan in 2018

AN OLD MAN’S WINTER NIGHT

All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off;—and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon,—such as she was,
So late-arising,—to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night.

-Robert Frost

Robert Frost