I was awake shortly after 5:00 this morning and was not, for a change, stressed about the day ahead. I had been pretty worried about the event last night and I was relieved and proud that...well, I guess I have these dreams of one day having a real grownup job again, and standing up and giving a one-minute introduction to a woman with a real grownup job is kind of an approximation of that? So, success!
Today is Ascension, which is a holiday in Switzerland (or at least Canton Zürich), and every year on Ascension Thursday our parish makes a pilgrimage to Kloster Fahr, which is only 5 km down the Limmat river from here. It's a beautiful location - the nuns there ran, until 2013, the "Bäuerinnenschule" - a residential program to teach young rural women the skills they needed to run a farm: cooking, cleaning, gardening, budgeting, animal care. And today there is still a full working farm with cows, pigs, goats, rabbits, a winery and a restaurant - and inside the monastery walls, a beautifully tended garden, a church and a chapel. I love this trip. Like many church events, it's short on young participants, and today we had a pretty good group of walkers and monastery-visitors (50, maybe?) but the only kids there were mine. They got rewarded for their troubles, though: Caroline got tons of kudos for being an altar server, and Christopher talked the priest's ear off on the walk there AND on the walk back. He was very sweet about it. And the weather was perfect, the river was stunning, our picnic lunch was yummy, we ordered pizza for dinner and all around, yay.
 |
| View of the "Riegelhaus" from the garden. |
 |
| Daniel took lots of flower pictures, isn't this one beautiful? |
 |
On Sundays and sometimes holidays there's a little ferry that will take you across the river.
|
 |
| Thick as theives |
No comments:
Post a Comment