My landscaping was ravaged by the last frost that hit the Tampa Bay area. I’ve done nothing about it, fearful that we might get one last blast.

Everything outside my windows looks dead. Brown and decaying. It is sad, though somehow strangely right, to have things dead-looking during Lent. It seems liturgically correct.  

For me personally, the sad exterior of my home and the liturgical season are more than “strangely right.” They are fitting. And perfectly match the landscape of my heart.

The past five Lents have been particularly poignant for me and have settled into my being like another self. Five years ago, during Lent, my son, Simon, was killed in a vehicular accident not long after he returned to the States from Iraq.  Two Lents ago, my husband, Anthony, was in the last days of his life. Brain cancer. He succumbed to a coma on Easter Sunday morning and died three days later. 

The lens of life turned brown then, like the shrubbery outside of my home. 

And every Ash Wednesday, without a conscious thought to the past, brown comes back and paints the inner recesses of my heart in somber tones. 

It’s a funny thing about those shrubs, though. They don’t tell the whole story. My limited vision sees only brown, but another color is working its way through them. Green.

Lent doesn’t tell the whole story either. New life is coming. Resurrection.

And my heart’s landscape is short-lived, too. Blossoms are on the horizon. Hope.

On my son’s grave marker is the passage Revelation 21:5 — “Behold, I make all things new.” And so He does. My God takes brown and makes it shimmer with gold. 

Easter is coming.