Staying at Home
Annarose Steinke Some keep the Sabbath going to Church — I keep it, staying at Home — With a Bobolink for a Chorister — And an Orchard, for a Dome — —Emily Dickinson1
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’ve lived in four different states and at least twice as many apartments since heading off to college in the year 2000. With each move, finding the local Catholic church was always at the top of my essential to-do’s, right up there with forwarding the mail and setting up the Comcast installation. In college, Sunday night Mass was a welcome refuge from Calculus 101 and dorm socials alike, a designated hour during which I knew precisely what to expect and what was expected of me. When I moved to Virginia for my first teaching job, I waited patiently on cobblestone steps at the end of a long line of men, all of them bearded and suspender-clad a good decade before the ironic vintage trend had taken off. Once I reached the vestibule, and a young woman in a floor-length dress with long sleeves gestured magnanimously toward an end table with a stack of lace doilies, I promptly turned around
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