The octagonal churches of southeast Eugene
Aug. 4th, 2004 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeToday's walk was up to the Catholic church, St. Jude's, to read the bulletin board -- always lots of good social action stuff there. It's a pretty building, an octagon, with only windows and support beams on five sides, east, south, and west. The view south, past the altar, is of Spencer Butte, which is some 2,000 feet tall and covered with douglas-fir forest (see my May 27 post for a picture). The Unitarian Church is also an octagon and is in thick oak forest, but there aren't quite as many windows and the room is much smaller.
I like to walk to the Catholic church sometimes because it's uphill (efficient use of exercise-time), and I hadn't been there in a while since walking uphill isn't much fun in the heat. It was cool and cloudy this evening, though, and I was also thinking about Margaret a lot today, and that was her church. Margaret was Arnold's first wife; she died 17 years ago, and all of her special things have been packed away in his closet until recently, and now I'm going through them all with my mom, to make sure her sons get them. Today's treasures included some really old photographs from her mother's family (including some of her great-grandparents!), an autograph book dated 1880, and box after box of slides from Margaret and Arnold's journeys and homes in places like Italy, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, etc. It would be wonderful to have the leisure to look at all the slides, if there were someone to explain what the places had meant to the family. It's a privilege, but a strange one, to handle and organize family heirlooms for a woman I never got to meet.
I like to walk to the Catholic church sometimes because it's uphill (efficient use of exercise-time), and I hadn't been there in a while since walking uphill isn't much fun in the heat. It was cool and cloudy this evening, though, and I was also thinking about Margaret a lot today, and that was her church. Margaret was Arnold's first wife; she died 17 years ago, and all of her special things have been packed away in his closet until recently, and now I'm going through them all with my mom, to make sure her sons get them. Today's treasures included some really old photographs from her mother's family (including some of her great-grandparents!), an autograph book dated 1880, and box after box of slides from Margaret and Arnold's journeys and homes in places like Italy, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, etc. It would be wonderful to have the leisure to look at all the slides, if there were someone to explain what the places had meant to the family. It's a privilege, but a strange one, to handle and organize family heirlooms for a woman I never got to meet.