The Color of Loss
I was a Lutheran kid who envied Catholic kids. They wore silver medals on sturdy chains around their necks, which could never be removed, not even when they went to bed or took a bath. They traded holy cards. Some, like my friend Michelle, carried fancy strings of beads in their pockets. “It’s a rosary,” she told me. “We use it to pray.” Rosary. What a beautiful word. I was the kind of kid who collected words, and right away it became my favorite.
I learned, from the look of shock on my mother’s face when I asked for one, that the what I thought was a a pretty necklace was in fact a tool of the devil.
“No. We fold our hands when we pray. We close our eyes, so that all we see is Jesus.” It was as bad as a crucifix, with the naked Jesus on it, when we knew that he came down from the cross to save our souls. That was the only Jesus we were allowed to see: the one who wasn’t there.
Ash Wednesday came, a day of smudged foreheads. The Catholic kids got to be two hours late to school. And with dirty faces. In the lunch line, waiting for fish sticks, they talked about the things they were giving up for the entire forty days of Lent. “Playing with my little brother,” Doris Johnson said. “You mean drinking beer and smoking,” Kevin Day replied. The boys smirked and elbowed each other. “I’m giving up mashed potatoes,” Michelle whispered. “I hate them anyway.”
That was Ash Wednesday, 1963. Fifty-nine years later, not only foreheads were smudged with ash. An entire country was suffering the predations of a mad tyrant. More than ash: ruined cities, hospitals, schools. Death, desperation, and displacement.
My relationship with social media is not what it should be. I know, I know, I’ve heard it a million times: You need to build an author platform. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, at least. YouTube, I guess. TikTok? Who am I anyway? Writer, mom, neighbor,citizen, photographer? Lover of rocky beaches and lighthouses? How to present myself is a problem that ties me in knots. My website suffers. I can’t figure out the other stuff. I feel stalled in time, as if waiting in the lunch line, pondering the equally distasteful choice between stewed tomatoes and spinach.
I’ve gotten used to “I was like . . “ in place of “I said.” I’m making peace with “Instagrammable.” As for Facebook-speak, I can handle “friend” as a verb. But to “unfriend” seems harsh. I’ve done it a couple of times, but only to those spreading poison and hate.
What do I post? I’ve looked back at my Facebook history, and it’s pretty sparse. Cats, mostly. Christmas ornaments. Sunsets, landscapes, coffee mugs, pictures of my kitchen. Important life events such as graduations, birthdays, anniversaries and weddings. Birds. Scyscrapers. And flowers. Lots and lots of flowers. Iris. Lilacs. Tulips. Peonies, And lavender.
Purple is the color assigned by the ecclesiastical calendar to the season of Lent. I’ve grown many varieties of lavender, wintering them through Minnesota winters in a sunny, south-facing window. One variety, called “jagged lavender” after its lacy foliage, bloomed - this year - extravagantly. One glass window kept it from the below-zero temperatures, high winds, and heavy snows. As Ukraine was invaded, as Ash Wednesday approached, I took a photo.
I posted it in a local gardening group on Facebook. Within two days, I had over nine hundred likes. A big number, given that most photos in that group got a couple hundred at most. And the comments! I felt like I’d joined the ranks of master gardeners, that I knew more than how to foster a single small miracle, to keep it alive for a few seasons. That I’d done more than take a picture with my phone and share it with a few thousand people who know what it means to stand up to the adversity of our Zone 4 weather.
I would love to think that my picture had a deeper meaning. That, like ashes on a forehead, the jagged leaves spoke of suffering and survival. I think of lavender as the flower and the color of Lent. But in 2022, the flower that speaks to the world’s survival is the sunflower, the symbol of Ukraine. This year, Lent is blue and yellow, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. I pray that these will not be the colors of one more unspeakable loss.
