Thursday was the Yearly Laundry Thing. This has become a minor festival in my own Christian calendar: the first day in the new year of hanging out laundry to line-dry. Like Easter, it is a movable feast, depending not on lunar cycles, but purely on the weather. Much can vary--cloud cover, temperature, wind speed and direction, crocuses up and out or not. But always one thing is true: the creek is flooding at the foot of my field. That always happens.

Always there's the same ritual: plunking the basket of wet stuff down on the top of the grey-weathered picnic table, stepping up on the bench seat, tossing a sheet onto the line, reaching for a handful of wooden clothespins and nipping them on, coldfingered. Later, there's that purely sensuous moment of folding the four corners of the first sheet together and getting a noseful of that purest incense which, whatever the commercials claim, cannot go in a bottle or box: the smell of line-dried laundry. Maybe God prefers the stuff we burn in church, but on the whole, I have my doubts.

So on Thursday, in spite of a work deadline, I put my nose out of doors, assessed the temperature and windspeed, rapidly washed a load of sheets, and had them out on the line before I got back to my project. And it occurred to me, as it always does each Yearly Laundry Thing Day, how much stays the same, and how much changes.

The back yard is the same, more or less: a little shabbier each year, and of course the trees are bigger--the junk Manitoba maple and poplars scrambling skyward at high speed, while the good baby maples, scions of my front-yard trees, grow slowly and steadily. The creek is the same as it always is in spate, broad, fast and silver. The wall, the ruins of the old garden, the elderly spruces, the picnic table--nothing's greatly different. Only every year, a slightly different woman stands on the picnic table bench-seat, tossing sheets on the line.

In most respects, life seems to stay much the same from one season to another. It's not that faith alters the realities we live with. We keep running into the same things over and over again: the same stresses and strains at work, problems with families and relationships, joys and disasters. Faith never makes life better, in the sense of making life easier to deal with. It merely (merely?) alters the way we respond.

In fact, in many ways, faith makes life more difficult because it goes with an increase in our consciousness of this great, beautiful, suffering world we live in. Knowing that God has regard for the field mice, now out of dormancy and scurrying under the long grass in the back field, I have to regard the mice too. That means knowing --truly understanding--that they really do suffer when my cats hunt them. But also and at one and the same time, God has equal regard for my cats, and it is embedded in their catness to hunt. God sees both sides of things with love, and with deep suffering for the suffering between them, and how God does this without losing God's marbles is simply beyond me. God's mind is clearly much more elastic than mine.

Max-cat decided at this point to join me on the picnic table; he is sociable when people are hanging out laundry. If you're in the mood to ruminate, he is companionably restful. Hard to imagine him terrorizing mice...

It's not that faith always changes a person in obvious, radical ways. Those poplars at the west edge of my field--an ex-neighbour planted them about 8 years ago, and then they were only a couple of feet tall. Now the tallest of them must be more than 25 feet. Their growth has been almost explosive. But my experience of faith is more like the way the each baby maple is growing: it seems not to change from one season to the next--until you notice out of the corner of your eye, to your surprise, that it's no longer a spindly sapling but a young tree, strong with promise.

Some of us first encounter God by being knocked cross-eyed by a flash of lightning, bowled over entirely. But God can be an awful lot sneakier than that, and often growth is so gentle and quiet that it doesn't look like anything at all--until, of course, you look back. Each year, as I pin out pillowcases, I can consider who and where I was the last Yearly Laundry Thing day. That's part of the festivities.

This year, I realize that I have to have more faith in God's ability to change things, myself most especially included. Sometimes it seems like you're going around the same block, over and over again, and that itself can be deeply unnerving: am I just repeating the old, self-defeating patterns, or has God truly changed me so that what seems like repetition is actually a fresh start?

In three weeks or so, we'll be out of Mud Season and into full-fledged spring. Right now, it's a resting time, an inbetween time, with only the odd crocus and the beginnings of what will be daffodils. I scraped a tiny bit of bark from each of the two baby maples I planted last summer, and both are alive and well. There's promise out there, but it's still mostly unspoken still partly hidden by the detritus from all those months of winter. We'll have to see what comes of it all, as this quiet grey season turns slowly toward glory.