Sunday in Wisconsin

The backyard flamingos apparently didn't like Tom's mowing this morning, so they moved around to protect the flowers in front of the house. They also must have decided that the Mardi Gras beads were worms, because several of them have beads drooping from their beaks.

This photo, incidentally, is not of our yard but of a yard in Austin in front of a business run by a guy named Pat Swanson. To quote from the website: "It could be said that the first battle to keep Austin Weird was fought over those gloriously goofy birds. It seems that at one point the "Fathers of Westlake" considered the birds a blight on the upscale community and sought to have them removed. Other Westlakers were up in arms over the prospect of losing the flock. The battle drew correspondents from AP, UPI, CNN and NPR, and even Jay Leno joked about the brouhaha on the Tonight Show. In the end, the pro-flamingo crowd won and the Pots and Plants lawn became a sanctuary for the beloved birds, reminding us that free spirits still prevail in Austin."

On the way to the funeral yesterday, we passed St. Joseph Catholic church in Adams, and there were For Sale signs out front, marked Commercial because it is right on Main Street, I guess. I gather they are building a new church or have merged with another small parish nearby. A lot of rural Wisconsin was settled by Catholics, and in the country they built a parish about every five miles -- the distance it was easy to travel in about an hour on Sunday to make it to Mass. Today, even though the Catholic population keeps growing, there are far fewer priests, so a lot of the smaller parishes are merging. The Lutheran minister who had the funeral serves two small parishes up here, ten miles apart.

Periodically I see real estate ads for churches for sale in the area. Recently the First Christian Science Church sold their building in Baraboo. It was a beautiful old house, and I suspect it had not been changed too much to turn into a church, given the nature of their worship. I ahve read that churches can be hard to sell, and a Jesuit in Boston who specialized in helping monks and nuns sell their old monasteries and convents said that it was hard to sell the buildings. Often the property is beautiful and well located, and sometimes the monastery had been an old mansion. But not that many people want to live in an old mansion today, especially after it has been chopped up into tiny rooms for nuns. The guy who bought the Carmelite's old house in Brookline eventually tore it down because he couldn't find another buyer for the building.

St. Cecilia Parish in the Dells is planning to build a new church because of the crowds in the summer. As it is, on Sunday there are two Masses going on at the same time at the 10:00 o'clock, and there is also a Mass at 8:00 and one Saturday evening that is for Sunday. Periodically a Polish-speaking priest comes to hear confessions and another comes for an occasional Mass in Polish. The pastor, Monsignor Felix G. Oehrlein, the pastor,took me to out for lunch last year not long after I moved. He was hoping he could sign me up to cover some Masses for him, but I explained that I was no longer functioning as a priest. Very nice guy, though.

This afternoon we went to check some flea markets and garage sales, mainly to get out of the house. It was so warm, though, that most of them had folded up and moved on. We drove around a little and I showed Tom where a friend of ours lives in Baraboo. A bunch of antique cars went by at one point, but we don't know where they came from or were going.

We wound up going to Farm & Fleet, where Tom got a red Farmall cap, then on to Menards. Up here there are two chains -- (Blain's) Farm and Fleet and (Mills) Fleet Farm. Pretty much the same sort of place and even very similar logos...I was told that they were originally one store owned by brothers who feuded and split the company up. Apparently that is just folklore, but they were founded the same year. Mills has 30 stores in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. Blain's has 33 in Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois. You can see how people get confused.