The Lutheran Ladies' Circle: Plucking One String

by Kris Knorr

  “This is what happens when a church calls someone right out of seminary.” Vera didn’t bother to hide the I-told-you-so in her voice. She’d voted against calling Poe Muldoon for their pastorate. He was a sincere minister, but Shaded Valley Lutheran needed a leader whose theology had been seasoned by cranky parishioners and pushy liberals. “These untested pastors get many of their ideas from internet forums and sensitivity groups.” She shook her head.

  Nan had seated herself at the corner of the table, far away from Vera. Her latest defensive weapon rested in her lap: a wad of yarn and a pair of needles. Busy hands would keep her mouth shut. No one paid attention to a woman knitting and minding her own business. She could watch the action without becoming collateral damage.

  “This year, the pastor and the Worship Committee have decided that Advent has become overshadowed and overlooked.” Vera straightened her already erect spine a bit more, lifted her chin, and paused, letting the silence build. With warning in her voice, she announced, “We can’t decorate or put up a Christmas tree until Advent is over.”

  Kay ruined the dramatic moment by shooshing across the floor, still in her bedroom slippers. She slid a plate of chocolate-oatmeal cookies in front of Micki, sat down, and laid her head on her folded arms on the table. Her face had crease lines from the pillow that had been piled under her nose until a few minutes before this Saturday morning meeting.

  “Why’d you even bother coming?” curly-haired Micki asked.

  “Cookie K.P,” she mumbled, shooing a hand at the plate of treats being passed around.

  Nan bit her lip. Her heart changed to a samba-beat of worry. Her knitting needles clicked a quick tempo as they birthed a mitten. As church organist, she planned for events. She understood what Vera was trying to tell them. With a grip on her needles, she pulled her lips tight against her teeth. She wasn’t going to say a word. Nope. Let someone else get picked for more work.

  “As I was saying,” Vera raised her voice, “if we wait the entire four weeks for Advent before allowing Christmas into the sanctuary, we’ll be doing four weeks of decorating in four days.”

  Silence descended upon the table, as though someone had taken the Lord’s name in vain.

  “Now, wait just a minute.” Hettie scowled. “I teach. I can’t decorate 24 windows in four days.” Her plump cheeks and curly-clown hair ruined her attempt to glare. Nan let out the breath she’d been holding and gave Hettie an encouraging nod.

  “Psshaw.” Kay propped an elbow on the table, leaning her cheek against her knuckles. “I do everything a few days before Christmas. As matter of fact, last year I did all my shopping on Christmas Eve. There were great sales.”

  “Yeah, we know how you decorate,” Hettie said flatly.

  Kay simply raised both eyebrows twice and smiled.

  “Advent has always been the Cinderella step-child to Christmas,” Hettie said. “What spiritual experience are we supposed to get out of this besides inconvenience?”

  Nan nodded like a bobble-head doll. Surely non-verbal support didn’t count as volunteering for anything, but to be sure, she didn’t look at Vera.

  “I had a long discussion with both the pastor and the head of the Worship Committee,” Vera said. “They felt Christmas would be more meaningful if we waited. I can understand where they’re coming from.” Vera’s voice was calm and slow. She even added a sympathetic smile. Now that others were indignant, she didn’t have to be. She could urge support of the silly idea and smile graciously when it failed. She was flexible that way. “Everyone starts Christmas as soon as Wal-Mart has sold enough Halloween masks to make room for tree ornaments. So we are going to wait on Christmas. That’s what ‘Advent’ means: waiting.”

  Hettie rubbed her forehead, gazing upward. “No…I’m pretty sure it means coming. It’s been about a hundred years since I was in Confirmation classes, but my two functioning brain cells remember that.”

  “Wasn’t Moses in your Confirmation class?” Kay asked.

  “Why, yes.” Hettie gave Kay a measured look. “That’s why the word is so clear to me. We saw Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai carrying our Catechism book. We didn’t have all those creeds and policies to memorize like there are now days—just ten commandments. Unfortunately, we had too much idle time. Started dancing. Making golden calves and whatnot.”

  “That’s exactly the point.” Vera tapped the table with her pencil. “Advent is about what you do while you’re waiting.”

  “I hate waiting.” Hettie scrunched her face up, making her glasses slide down her nose.

  Micki’s eyes widened with concern. “Oh Vera…have you told the Sanctuary Arts Team? Lorena’s eyes will spin in her head when she hears this.”

  Nan lay her knitting in her lap. She loved the passion of these meetings. It was the stuff You Tube videos were made of. “You need to light a fire under her, Vera,” she said. “That Team still hasn’t removed the Thanksgiving display.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Nan. That’s my job. In the meantime,” Vera pointed her pencil, “you need to organize the children’s Christmas play.”

  Nan winced.

  *

  “Roger, this is Vera calling. I wanted to thank you for bringing in one of your prize pumpkins for the fall display.”

  Always start off with a compliment. She’d learned the sandwich method of criticism at the first church Jim had been called to serve. The pianist had played every hymn to the tempo of Streets of Laredo, the western song of 1924. Slow and loopy. Jim had asked the musician to pick up the beat, but the same swoopy melody came through, as though she could only read four notes before pausing to decipher four more.

  Vera had also talked to the woman—just to make her husband’s words clearer. She’d carefully wrapped her hidden criticism with compliments. Strangely, the good parts were the only thing the pianist chose to hear. Afterward when anyone complained, the musician claimed, “The pastor’s wife likes my playing.” Since then, Vera had learned to sharpen her words.

  “Thanks,” Roger said. “I was pleased to do it. I saved the biggest pumpkin I had for the church. It weighed 100 pounds. The kids carved a bunch of ’em for Halloween. Our littlest guy was able to crawl inside after they hollowed ’em out. He sat outside all night, jumping from the pumpkin and scaring Trick-or-Treaters away from the door. He was pretty slimy by bedtime.”

  “Oh my. Well, visitors certainly noticed your big pumpkin here. But in the future, Roger, I’d appreciate it if you’d simply give it to me, rather than tearing apart my display. I spent quite a bit of time creating the arrangement.”

  “I’ll grow a bigger one for you next year. It’ll be huge.”

  Vera paused, replaying his words. Men liked to miss the point of a conversation. She mentally recast her message, amping up the disapproval, but Roger was talking again.

  “And I’m guessing that it’ll make at least 30 pies.”

  “Wait. What are you saying? I called to ask you to come get it.”

  “No. Keep it. You women are always begging for pies for this or that affair.”

  “Roger, I made pumpkin pies from scratch once, and that experience was enough to last a lifetime. They tasted exactly like the canned filling you buy at the grocery store. It was so much work, I vowed I’d gladly pay Mr. Libbey or Mr. Dole to do it for me.”

  “It was a gift, Vera. My gift to God. I gave my biggest and my best. I sure haven’t had anybody call and ask me to come get the gift I threw in the collection plate. Keep it. God’ll use it.” He hung up.

  Vera stared at the receiver in her hand. Since Jim had died, she was trying to be bendable. Truly she was, but other people weren’t. Life had been a lot easier when she hit them between the eyes with the bare-naked truth.

  Seasons of Change

  LORENA HEAVED THE green totes from the spare bedroom closet and dragged them in a predetermined order into her living room. She opened the top of the first carton to reveal red ceramic dinner plates dotted with white snowflakes. She
’d used these every Christmas for the last twenty years. It was comforting to have traditions. Why did people feel they had to change things?

  Tapping the plate against her palm, she gazed at the unadorned, artificial tree in the front room. She wished it would break or fall apart, so she could get one of those new ones that had lights she’d never have to remove.

  She scanned the itemized labels on each tote. Popping the top on the “Lights” box, she pulled out three strings of miniature twinklers, each neatly wound around a cardboard frame. One string had a note attached to it: “Flashes quickly-Start with this one.” She began weaving it through the fake branches.

  It always made her think about Ralph, her ex. Every year of their marriage, she’d nagged him for several weeks to accompany her to the tree lot. After they’d hauled the perfect tree home, he’d lay under it, cussing, batting the lower branches, and turning the screws in the base as she directed him.

  “A little to the left. No! That’s too much. Now back right. No! Back left.” Inevitably he’d give up, flogging the project with unholy words, and Lorena ended up turning the tree so its tilt wasn’t noticeable from the entryway.

  After one evergreen bout, she pleaded with him to help put on the lights, a job she hated because she was too short to reach the top branches. It took him approximately three minutes to stuff the strings around the tree. He hadn’t exactly thrown them on, but green cords looped in the air from the branches, and most of the lights were bunched in the middle.

  I didn’t say a word, not a word. She had smiled sweetly, thanked him for helping, then redid them the next day before he came home from work. It was only years later, she suspected that he’d done such a shoddy job so she’d never ask him to do it again. And darn if it hadn’t worked.

  Lorena moved her step-stool methodically around her man-made tree, placing lights deep between the limbs and then connecting string #2, “Slow Flasher.” She hung a crocheted lace angel at the end of string #3, so she’d know exactly where the end was when it was time to disassemble.

  As she placed the boxes of matched ornaments on the coffee table, she admired their color scheme and polished look. Ralph always wanted a “grade-school-tree” with a motley collection of ornaments, big multi-colored light bulbs—the kind people used in the 50s—and lots and lots of tinfoil icicles dangling from every branch.

  He never wanted to decorate the tree, but he always had opinions about how it should look. Lorena frowned, thinking of the one year she’d told him that if he wanted icicles on the tree, he’d have to do it himself, and she left the package on the kitchen counter. The next morning she saw the foil strands wadded in one spot like a metallic bird’s nest. Ralph had said that he didn’t have time to separate and hang each little thread over every limb. He’d grabbed them out of the package and thrown them from the doorway.

  “It was the most fun I ever had decorating a tree,” he laughed.

  But I fixed it. Who could stand looking at such a mess? And I never bought icicles again. He could just do without.

  Since the divorce, she had the tree she’d always wanted: petite purple hearts, lace ribbons, fine filigree gold balls, and pearl garland. She plugged in the evergreen-scented air freshener that was packed with the decorations. As she sorted through the rest of the tote, she saw the cardboard shoe box. She plopped heavily into her mauve Mission chair and stared. Every year she had to deal with that box.

  Santa, the reindeer, and something that could be elves or cookies stared back at her from the box’s cardboard sides: crayon drawings her son had done years ago. The lid’s corners were broken, and the top slid off when she picked it up.

  A green globe with “Cozumel, Mexico” painted in fiery colors lay in the center of the collection. Ho! Ralph did not want to go on that trip.

  He’d grumped, “I didn’t leave anything in Mexico, so I don’t have a reason to go back.”

  They hadn’t been married long at that point, and back then, she’d had more determination to fight for what she wanted. “Because I’m in the early stages of pregnancy, this might be the last trip I get to take for a while, so we’re going,” she’d demanded. They’d had a good time too. It took Ralph several days and a bucket of margaritas to stop grousing, but by the week’s end, he’d agreed that it was good to get away.

  She lifted the tiny model of Cinderella’s castle. She didn’t know who’d been more excited about going to Disneyland: herself or their son. Even Ralph had enjoyed the trip although he’d complained about traffic, smog, and too many people.

  There was a tiny pair of lederhosen. Ralph had fun on that trip. Probably because it was his idea. He’d heard about a town in northern Washington called Leavenworth which had fallen on hard times, so the city fathers rebuilt the whole place into a German village. It was one of the few times Ralph had voluntarily pried himself from work. “Because,” he said, “this will be a lot cheaper than going to Germany.” He strolled through the streets eating sausages and drinking beer. He even danced the polka with her. It was only the second time in her life Lorena could remember him dancing.

  Memories flashed in front of her as she handled the remaining trinkets in the box. How could someone live with you for twenty years, and then one day come home and announce that he was moving to the high desert of eastern Oregon?

  She’d thought he was setting her up for a joke, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t. He had decided to sell their house, buy a trailer, and park it on 40 dusty acres. He was tired of neighbors, tired of traffic, and tired of people. If Lorena wanted to come with him, she could. If not, then she’d have to find someplace else to live.

  She’d tried to find the reason for this seemingly sudden decision, tried to talk to him, even pleaded, but he wouldn’t be swayed. When it dawned on her that he’d made this choice about their future without even considering her opinion, she realized her status in their marriage. He hadn’t suddenly changed; she had been blind to it all along. She’d been so busy working, child-rearing, and making their home special that she had accommodated Ralph at his every uncooperative turn.

  Being single at fifty, she moved home, to Oklahoma, where she’d been born. She hadn’t made it in time to be with her father, but her mother was still there. She’d bought a house and planted what she wanted in the yard. She’d painted every wall a different color, and changed it whenever she liked. Best of all, she didn’t have to get permission from anyone.

  The last she’d heard, Ralph was barbecuing out on his acreage, pleased that he didn’t have to pay for water or electricity and could sit in a lawn chair and shoot coyotes and gophers. She hoped that he was bored out of his mind. Her life was full. Well, Sunday afternoons were lonely. Vera had told her she couldn’t start stringing garland around the church. That’s why she was decorating the tree today, to kill a Sunday afternoon.

  She blinked. Multi-colored Christmas lights had switched on at the house across the street. When had night fallen? How long had she been sitting there? The tiny leather lederhosen still lay in her palm. Carefully, she put them in the box and replaced the lid. An unconscious sigh escaped as she worked the carton to the bottom of the storage tub. Maybe next year she’d be ready to get rid of these ornaments.

  The house was silent. Every room was dark. She should turn on a light. She should put on some Christmas music.

  She sat, staring at the silhouette of the tree and wondering who would see it if she bothered to decorate.

  “Our God is not a God of Chaos” 1Corinthians 14:33

  “COULD YOU USE some help?” Allie, the newest member of the Ladies Circle, shrugged off her coat as Micki wired evergreen branches onto a circular candelabrum.

  “Always.” Sweet-faced Micki beamed her ever-accepting smile. “This is a sticky job, though.”

  “Better than sticky kids. They were driving me crazy. I had to escape.”

  “How old are they?” Micki picked up two branches of greenery.

  “Johnny’s five. Bette’s three.”

&n
bsp; “Mine’s a teenager, and she’s still driving me nuts. Here, hold the branches and I’ll wire them on the wreath.”

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to decorate until after Advent.”

  “This isn’t a decoration. It’s a calendar.”

  “Looks Christmasey to me.” Allie shook her head. “I feel like the new kid in school. I go to those meetings and sense deep history between all of you. I’d like to know some of the women better, but I don’t want to nose into their lives. I don’t even ask questions at the meeting. Half the time, I don’t know what the Ladies Circle is discussing.”

  “I’m sorry.” Micki’s face crumpled into the sympathetic pout she used when someone dropped their ice cream cone. “I’ll try to help you more. The women are a pretty easy bunch to get to know. Volunteer to work on a project with someone. After a bit, you’ll learn everyone’s story, probably more than you want to know.” Micki’s pudgy fingers pulled on the wire. “Would you hand me another branch? Get some of that cedar.” She pointed at blue-green needles. “When you’re born into a Lutheran family, it becomes part of you, like having a quirky aunt who speaks Esperanto. You just pick it up. What don’t you understand?” Micki didn’t say anything when Allie chose a skinny fir twig and held it in place.

  “Why can you put this wreath-calendar-thingy behind this fence? I thought we couldn’t decorate.”

  “First, girlfriend, you’ll be thrilled to learn that every part of the church has a name.” Micki’s high-pitched little-girl voice sounded strange coming from her rather round body, She appeared even more volleyball-like when she stood next to her fence-post husband. Her dark, flowing curls and eternal smile gave her a Shirley Temple nuance. If you were lost and scanned the crowd looking for someone who’d help you, you’d choose Micki every time—and a lot of people did.