Introibo- with Flowers

Royal lilies, alstroemeria, and boxwood. I have spent the Easter Octave rejoicing and recovering from the most intense Triduum experienced to date.  It was glorious.  We are eternally grateful to the visiting priest who drove twenty hours of windy coastal roads, wrote four extensive liturgy plans (for Palm Sunday through Easter Vigil), coached us, bought us a fancy Vigil firepit at Costco and brought with him everything from a crotalus and vestments,  to a portable altar with custom-made antependium.  All so this small TLM community could celebrate the Sacred Triduum! We are blessed to have such a dedicated priest.   It was twenty-six Easter Vigils ago, at a Catholic College in the rusty steel belt, that I was immersed in a baby pool of water, anointed, given the name Gemma Jacinta, and received Our Lord for the first time.  Yes, it's been an adventure since I stepped out of the plastic kiddie pool.  This Triduum, my first in the Traditional Lati...

Arrangements for the altar of repose on Holy Thursday. Daffodils, white tulips, jasmine, passion flower greens, hebe and dusty miller.  Thank you  Fleur de Marie-Jacqueline  for the inspiration! *A cautionary tale about daffodils.  I bought them on Holy Wednesday looking gorgeous.  By Holy Thursday morning the petals were beginning to turn slightly papery and brown, and by the time I arranged them and transported them a half hour in the car...not so great.  Buy them the day of the Mass, if possible!  The ones that were partially closed when I bought them on Wednesday, oddly, didn't look so great either.   Thanks be to God, from a short distance they looked very pretty.   This was also my opportunity to use passion flower vine which I tucked in at the base of the arrangements.  I discovered the beautiful symbolism of this vine only a few years ago.  Find more on that  here. Some two years ago or so, our good curé asked...