40 Bags: Day 4, Bag 4; and Other Things

A total cheat:  a big bag of egg cartons I had been saving on the back porch for a friend who has chickens and sometimes gives eggs away. They were already bagged;  all I had to do was carry them to the car.

I am seeing a theme emerge here, of car-as-dumpster. I still haven't gotten rid of the stuff in the trunk, and now there are egg cartons, a whole garbage bag full, on the back seat. Clearly my spirit of detachment needs some work.

Meanwhile, Lenten reading:

Aloud to the children, The Lord of the Rings. We're in the second half of The Two Towers right now, slogging with Frodo and Sam to Mordor in the company of Gollum. They've just confronted the impossibility of getting in at the front gate and are having to trust Gollum --perilously, of course -- on the way to Cirith Ungol.

For myself, I'm reading Rumer Godden:  Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy and In This House of Brede. I've already finished the first and am tearing through the second; what I think I plan to do is just read them over and over, in rotation, throughout Lent, and think not only about the larger themes of redemption and detachment from the past which permeate both books, but about the charisms and spiritualities of the two communities, the Dominicans of Five for Sorrow and the Benedictines of Brede. I have never thought seriously about becoming the tertiary of an order, mostly because I struggle so much with my one basic Rule of Life -- Pray sometime, slacker! -- and now that I think of it, struggle is not even the right word, because I don't. I just pretend not to have any rules at all, mostly. Yet when I read these novels, I wonder if I haven't just been running away from something that wants to look me in the eye, hard.

But then I suspect that a lot of people who read these novels feel this way . . .