Last Matins (Somewhat accurate transcript)

Good morning. Um. So I'm Katie, and I've been at Holden for the last ten and a half months -- working as the school's student aide, as worship assistant, and as a cook -- and I leave soon. For, I don't know how long. And I can't tell you how that feels because I've kind of refused to slow down and think about it. I guess I suspect I'll be sad. But there's plenty to do, to keep my mind off things, what with preparing for a move, and wrapping up the work I've done here. I've filled my head, too, with the adventures that are coming next: visiting with family and friends, travel, another move, starting at Divinity School in the fall. I'll turn my own mourning into dancing, thank you.

I'm really smart. But I don't always think things through all the way, so I did something antithetical to this whole enterprise of not thinking about leaving Holden, and not being sad about it. I signed up for Matins, and gave myself the perfect opportunity to think about just how much this place and people have meant to me. But I've figured out how I'm going to do it -- I'm going to read you something from my journal. It doesn't actually take place here; I wrote this while I was sojourning outside the village. But, this is also how I feel about my sojourn here. So.

(Names changed to protect the innocent.)

30 April 2009

So aside from the time I met a Tibetan Buddhist monk at the Seattle Amtrak station, I usually get put next to crazies and lawyers and other undesirables when I travel, and as a rule I think people who talk about meeting people on trains and having "conversations" are fools or liars or just inexperienced. Last evening looked like it might live up to expectations. Hank and Edna are sweet enough, the ride to Seattle and dinner at "Rusty's" passed smoothly -- then they called ahead to make sure I could stay with them at Edna's sister's, and caught on speaker-phone a surly sounding woman with a cancer-stricken cat and an overpronounced sense of that great Kierkegaardian virtue of "infinite resignation." Well, she uttered into Edna's (and my) hearing, it sounds like you've already promised her a bed, so I don't see there's anything else to say.

I had half a mind to beg Hank and Edna to drop me at Sea-Tac after all, where I could sleep sitting up or not at all but at least I wouldn't be in anybody's way, or jockeying with their sick cat for attention.

But then we arrived, and it turns out: you can catch remarkably kind and open and generous people at tremendously unfortunate moods. Expectations can be upset, and narratives rewritten at a stroke. We got out of the truck and immediately toured the yard and ten years' worth of incredible gardening skill, flowers of all kinds and lavender plants and lemon grass stepping all over one another, crowding to the surface. Once inside, I was shown my bed and Susan Boyle's performance on YouTube, and at the dining room table hot breakfast tea and eight kinds of half-finished chip, cracker and crisp bag, and cheese, and paprika-spiced hummus. And we talked and joked about Holden, about teaching, about Florida -- where Edna and her sister and I all grew up. What they call conversation, I guess. Although "conversation," when I hear about it secondhand, always seems a more civilized practice. We moved from observing that the Hank prefers his blue suspenders and come to think of it, blue everything, to Edna suddenly rounding on him with the accusative, "Ya crunchy-eating Yankee."

Substantial to this accusation was the Yankee propensity for salad, as opposed to vegetables steamed or boiled away into a state of semi-permanent flop. I presume. We proceeded to a rousing comparison of Florida's coastal cities and interior, where Hank and Edna have seen washing machines out in the middle of a yard, but running, with the help of a garden hose and an extension cord.

There's nothing quite like people around a dining room table, ill-disposed to rush off and get work done, or to have time to accomplish whatever million things they've set for themselves.

No, nothing quite like it. At all.

For the moments of indecorum, for the first impressions that were absolutely wrong, and the ones that were pretty scarily accurate, thank you. And for the cracks in your clay jars, the thorns in your sides that keep you irritated at yourselves and your neighbors, seething over your oatmeal, wondering how I can talk about this place like the last ten and a half months have been nothing but sunshine when you can't even make it through the morning:

For these things, too, Christ has died.
To raise you to new life, in a new moment, Christ is risen.
To reunite us all someday, Christ will come again.

I'll see you.