Tonight at church we have a short service, Matins for Leavetaking of Pascha. It’s the last time we will sing all the wonderful jubilant Paschal hymns, and cry, “Christ is risen!” many times. Tomorrow is the actual day, followed quickly by Ascension.
In this icon you see our Lord bestowing life on those in the tombs, delivering souls from hell, “trampling down death by death.”
I’m so glad to be able to attend, and feast my soul on these fundamental glad tidings. Christ is risen, indeed!
Pipe tobacco was what my siblings and I gave our father for Christmas year by year. He smoked his pipe every evening while reading after dinner, and when my grandfather was 
visiting, they would settle down in armchairs side-by-side and smoke together.
My understanding of the health risk is that it is significantly less than cigarette-smoking, because one doesn’t inhale very much. Those who smoke a pipe testify that it is incredibly relaxing, and the practice has even been prescribed as a treatment for anxiety disorder.
I can see how the habit might preclude other worse habits from developing, such as overeating, hurrying and worrying. My father lived to the age of 90, but to make a full disclosure, I must say that he stopped smoking a pipe when he was in his 50’s. Grandfather (his is the arty pic below) also lived past 90; he stopped when my father stopped, as he no longer had a smoking companion.
That pipe-smoke smell is one of my favorites from long ago, but one that I haven’t encountered for many years. Let it here be noted that if any of my sons or grandsons take up the custom, I will start making gifts of tobacco again. This offer doesn’t apply to the girls.
I recently discovered a blog honoring Famous Pipe Smokers , hundreds of them, from Clark Gable to Winston Churchill and Oscar Peterson. None of the fascinating photographs of these people pipes-in-mouth is as charming to me as the one of my sister and me on the lap of our dear pipe-smoker. He is not likely to be noted with the celebrities, but he is the most famous to me.
As Husband and I were lingering over our soup this evening, the sharp cracks began to interrupt our conversation. Our wisteria is at the peak of bloom, but some seed pods from last summer are hanging on. Just now, after a winter that was wetter and longer than usual, followed by several windy and warm days, they are exploding and shooting their seeds across the yard.
I went outside just before the sun went down and caught some pictures. Here is the evidence on the patio, along with fallen blossoms.
At right, one seed sticking out from its pod, holding on by a thread.
It must be a complicated formula that tells the pods when to burst open, or a certain number of hot and cold contractions, combined with humidity, that determines why some shoot in the spring, and some in the fall.
One September our neighbor whose yard backs up to ours phoned us after dark and said, “I am really afraid; it sounds like someone is shooting at my house!”
We told her it was the wisteria. Hers always blooms way earlier than ours in the spring, being on the east side of her house, while ours is on the west, and in its own tardy micro-climate. They probably do their seed-scattering alternately as well.
We are kept busy pruning or sweeping, smelling or listening to this vine through all the seasons of the year. It’s a great back yard resource!
A nearly sleepless night following an exhausting day yesterday, made for a day where I felt dreadfully slow, and sickly in various ways, and wore my dunce cap all day, too. I lack good judgment when my body is this tired. That is, I can’t think well enough to know how to minimize the bad effects of extreme fatigue, and decision-making is a challenge. Last time this happened to me I went shoe-shopping because I had a birthday discount coupon at my favorite store, and I ended up spending a lot of money on the wrong thing, and could not get it back.
So at least I knew enough not to go to any stores. But I didn’t take a nap, because I thought, “Naps don’t usually work for me.” Now I think it would have been worth a try. I didn’t spend any money online, either, so that was good. I managed to come up with some short comments on other people’s blogs, but I couldn’t write anything long and thoughtful, so as to make progress on my book reviews, for example.
Now I have taken my Benadryl, to make sure that I sleep deeply. I had to take it early, because it takes a good twelve hours to get out of my system. Tomorrow has its own long list of projects and I don’t want to risk another day down. Thank God I can afford to have a surprise slow day and not make a lot of people suffer for what I didn’t do.
If this quote from Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, is true, “God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die,” then I will wake up again tomorrow and be delighted to see that my dunce cap is no where to be seen.
