This is the first in what I intend to be a series on the lessons fairytales can teach us about faith, life, and the saints. The story of Cinderella is pretty well-known A young girl is forced into servitude by her relatives and then goes after the heart of the prince (usually with some help), loses her shoe which the prince then uses to find and identify her, and she reaps vengeance on her hateful relatives by living happily ever... Read more
Death. Sometimes we see our loved ones suffering and just want it to be over for them, and for us. For them to no longer be in pain, for us to no longer be in pain. For the struggle to stop. We want the waiting to be over and to be able to move on. It’s natural. But death is never really over. Not even after you bury the dead in the ground and return to routine. It’s not over... Read more
He is risen! Alleluia! May this day and season be blessed and bountiful for you and your loved ones. Here’s a fun instruction on how to make Pysanky, traditional Ukrainian and Polish dyed eggs. Image courtesy of Wikimedia commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pysanky2011.JPG Read more
Death has been knocking on our doors a lot lately. Personally, it seems like death is trying to drown me I “celebrated” the twelfth anniversary of my mom’s passing recently. On that same day, my favorite author and illustrator, Tomie dePaola died. Only a couple days after that, my uncle (my mom’s brother) died from complications from COVID-19, alone, separated from his family. My best friend’s father found out he has acute myeloid leukemia. My baby’s baptism is... Read more
Tomie dePaola passed away yesterday. He was a renowned author and illustrator of many, many children’s books, including my favorite Strega Nona. I don’t know much about Tomie the man but from what I’ve read and been told about him he was a joyful, generous, kind man. That fits very well with the man I picture writing and illustrating the stories that have captivated me for decades and that my own children now adore. I once retold the story of Strega... Read more
This time last year, I used Jen Fulwiler’s Word of the Year Generator to pick a theme for 2019 and got “Fertility” Fertility has many meanings beyond the human procreative one. Produce much writing. Grow in my friendships and relationships. Create something new. 2019 did end up fertile for me (yes, I did actually have a baby, too), in many of the ways I expected and many ways I wouldn’t have seen coming if they were about to run me... Read more
I planned on writing a review or at least a post after every episode of this last season of Game of Thrones. Obviously, that did not happen. I only wrote once at the very beginning and could not bring myself to write more. Part of this lapse was the suspense of finally finding the fate of Westeros and these characters. Part was laziness, I’ll admit. A greater part was that, although I still hold that GoT hinges on the relationships between... Read more
I first heard about St. Maria Goretti when I was in eighth grade at a Catholic school. I was randomly assigned her to write a paper on. I remember her being attacked by a man who tried to rape her and that he stabbed her to death instead. I created a poster of her dressed in white to signify her purity. That’s as far as I ever got in my relationship to her or my understanding of her. She had... Read more
I’ve seen a lot of death in my life. I had gone to three funerals by the time I turned five, though I only remember two. One was my dad’s relatively young and healthy cousin who dropped dead of a massive heart attack, gone before he even hit the floor. Another was my Grandpap who I was especially close with. I remember that day very well (for being only four and a half years old). It was remarkably sunny and... Read more
Everything was dead. There wasn’t much grass nor many weeds or flowers, just gravel and dirt, abandoned buildings and silence. Death hung in the air so heavily it could engulf you. The pain, the torture, the intensity, the heroism, the death. Lives that once were and now are in the eternal. So many innocents just gone. The air was cool and the sky gray. Everything seemed to stop as we set foot in Auschwitz. In college, a catechetics professor once... Read more
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