A Little Lent on the Prairie
A Little Lent on the Prairie
By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures
Dear Henry,
Palm Sunday is around the corner, and Easter is almost here.
I realized recently that I’ve never really spent a Lent the way I imagined I would. Most years were spent dealing with something external, or traveling, or simply trying to keep up. Lent, it seems, rarely arrives under ideal conditions.
But the most memorable Palm Sunday I ever spent was in Fairfax, Oklahoma.
One year, we had to sell our house during Lent, and the open house fell on Palm Sunday weekend. So we packed a bag, took Ziggy, and escaped to a small cabin on a pecan-and-cattle ranch just outside Fairfax in the Osage Nation. I chose it, rather optimistically, because the Osage are a Catholic people (read that story here), and I assumed there would be something resembling “Lent food” nearby.
That was… not what happened.
Fairfax, home to the celebrated ballerinas Maria and Marjorie Tallchief, and once the epicenter of the oil murders later told in Killers of the Flower Moon, is a small place. About a thousand people. At the time, the only real option was Brandy’s Drive-In, which specialized in hamburgers.
We eventually found a small market and, buried deep in the freezer, uncovered a couple of cheese pizzas and a box of very questionable fish sticks. Bon appétit!
We carried our frozen treasures back to the cabin, turned on the oven, and promptly set off every carbon monoxide detector in the place. So much for Plan A. Plan B involved the pellet grill outside, and as it turns out, slightly freezer-burned pizza and fish sticks cooked over wood fire are surprisingly edible.
The whole trip became a kind of rustic improvisation, dodging cows, making do, and laughing at how far off-course everything had gone. It wasn’t what we expected at all. But then again, neither are the stories we end up telling. The stories that stay with us are never the perfect ones; they’re the ones where everything went sideways.
And maybe that’s part of Lent we tend to forget.
It doesn’t arrive neatly. It doesn’t follow our plans. It rarely looks the way we think it should.
Sometimes it looks like a disruption. Sometimes, like disappointment. And sometimes, like a quiet invitation to let go of the version of things we were trying to control.
And yet, if we remain within God’s grace, even the most inconvenient roads begin to reveal their purpose, leading us, slowly and often unexpectedly, to where we were meant to be all along.
xoxo a.d. elliott
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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.
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