First Signs of Spring

Yesterday morning on the drive to work, I noticed the median on the Northwest Expressway blooming with these purple weeds that are always the first things to come up in your yard. I looked it up on the web this afternoon and see it identified as "henbit." I know it's a menace, but I am always so glad to see those happy purple flowers, that I don't really even mind.

Then, last night, when I went to have dinner at Bob's after rehearsal, there on his kitchen table were three daffodils in a jar of water. Daffodils. It must really be spring!

Rehearsal last night went okay... I'm still pretty skeptical about this whole endeavor, but fortunately my role is miniscule. Tonight we do a full run-through at 5:30 (or close to...) and then an actual "dress rehearsal/ performance" for 50 Kiowa elders at 7. It's going to be pretty nervewracking for the artists playing the Kiowa Five, especially the one who is not Kiowa!

Yesterday before our rehearsal started, Warren Queton, who plays one of the Five, and is a young member of the Black Legging Society, fired up some charcoal and cedar and did a smudge prayer and ceremony in the back yard. We each bathed in cedar smoke and then Warren carried the burning cedar through the house to purify every room. There is something that makes y ou feel good about the Native American cedar smudge. You know that the cedar smoke has been used a form of blessing by the Indian people for hundreds of years, and they do it in such a reverent yet matter-of-fact way.

I remembered that all my other houses, except this last one, I have smudged with sage and blessed before moving into (I also did not smudge the apartment). I will never make that mistake again. When I buy or rent another home, I will definitely cleanse it with cedar and wrap it in red string to bless it. Maybe that is superstitious, but surely a place that has held so much of human life retains some echo of it. Maybe it needs to be made ready for a new beginning, as people do. I was glad to be blessed by cedar smoke at the Jacobson House last night, and felt that it was long, long overdue.

Bob, by the way, is not a shabby cook. He whipped up a quick pesto pizza with olives and feta and we dined like royalty curled up on his shabby futon sofa with tumblers of red wine and music on vinyl LPs from the 60s.