bones of saints

Today is not a good day. It's mid-afternoon and I have accomplished little today. I am trying to write about the commodification of the body. I feel sure that material on medieval relics (the bones of saints), rumors of body-snatching, the global organ trade, and the free market where all the world's for sale all fits together somehow in a brilliant essay. I just don't know that I'm the woman to write it.

It's spring and there are orchids and otters and birds waiting for me on the Western Isles, puffins and others with evocative names like divers and guillemots and shearwaters and snow buntings.

So let me go back to Easter Sunday. I had a good Easter. I didn't work at all. My lovely Scottish Episcopal church was all yellow and green and full of leaves. We were all herded into the back hallway and then we followed women with spices, like the women who went to anoint Christ's body that long ago day, and walked into sunlight and glory. We've had this huge crown of thorns hanging above the altar in the middle of the room all through Lent, twisted reeds with barbed wire wrapped round it, and that morn it was wreathed with branches and flowers like a May Day crown. Satin streamers stretched from it to all the corners of the room over our heads, Christ and spring and resurrection all mingled--fragrant, intertwined and alive.

And we had an Easter ceilidh that night, a kind of Scottish dancing that gave birth to square dancing in America. All generations danced together, and a wee girl I'll call Anna, who has a language comprehension condition and normally only speaks to her family and never to me, despite my longstanding attempts to win her over, came up to me and my two companions and sat on our laps and chattered and played with little pipe-cleaner Easter chicks. It was somewhat violent play, which I blame entirely on the child--we made them jump the plank and fight like roosters and flattened them with our fists and made them eat shortbread until they burst. And then she danced the Virginia Reel with me and I think that was about as much resurrection as anyone can ask for.