Day 70

What a beautiful day!  Like Spring.  Pink fingers of clouds in the milky morning sky as I swanned down the highway, and glorious sunshine all day, and so warm in the Art room that we opened all the windows! 

Of course, we are supposed to have another big storm Wednesday going into Thursday, but today was a beauty, giving us hope for the future, warming our bones, making us happy!  So that we can wait another few weeks for the delicate crocuses and proud dandelions which are the first heralds, and then the actual buds, the newest green leaves, and all the tremendous burgeoning LIFE!

My little advisory group was so funny today, as we have been having trouble lately with respectful listening.  They are all crazy-lively, super-springy today, terribly enthusiastic and a couple of them are also very loud! So I asked them what sign we could use which would work so that on command they will all keep quiet.  They came up with this idea:  I clap twice, and they all respond by raising one arm like a trunk and making a sound like an elephant's trumpet!  Then they are quiet and I can talk without anyone interrupting me.  And it worked very well (for today).

When we were in England for Emma's wedding two years ago my sister and I went to see a very old friend of my mother's, Vicky, who lives in Kent with her daughter.  The two families used to live next door to one another in Pinelands, Cape Town, before I was born, and Diana, Vicky's daughter, is the same age as my brother, so the two played together and got into an awful lot of trouble, apparently.  My brother was very accident-prone as a child, and Diana kind of followed along behind his calamities.  Vicky is now 96, I think, and still wonderful, full of life and telling her lovely stories in her lilting Irish brogue.  She and my mum were friends for nearly 60 years.

Auntie Vicky telling one of her lively stories!

They took us on an outing, to a place they knew we would love, a church called All Saints Tudeley, which is the only church in the world to have all its stained glass windows designed and created by Marc Chagall!  The little church doesn't look like anything special from the outside, but you walk in, and yes, you just walk in, it's not locked or anything, you can give a little donation in a box if you want to, and you can walk around and marvel and stay as long as you want to in this beautiful space! 

Between 1963 and 1978, Chagall replaced all the windows in the little 13th century church.  A wealthy Jewish landowner and his Christian wife had lost their 21-year old daughter Sarah in a boating accident, and commissioned a memorial window from Chagall.  Chagall fell in love with the little church and decided to do all the windows, apparently he fell a little in love with Sarah's mother too (it appears that he was always a terrible flirt), and isn't it strange that this little ancient Christian church has windows done by an old Russian Jewish man, playing with light?