Notes on “Semana Santa”:
a town square, a seventeenth-century church of six-foot-thick adobe walls newly whitewashed for Semana Santa, church bells pealing the daily rythms of the townspeople
a richly textured, three-dimensional world—brightly colored shawls, swooping skirts like moths and butterflies, woodsmoke rising from thatched roofs, market stalls, crowded buses with huge bundles on top, flowers that grow by the grace of God—and processions, always religious processions, with images of the saints whose history is mixed with the old Mayan religion
Calvario—a pilgrimage chapel on a mountain top, the street from the church in the town square to Calvario, our house along that street
Semana Santa—Holy Week, larger-than-life statues of Jesus carrying the cross, Jesus on the cross, Jesus in the coffin, images of the Marys and the various saints, hundreds of penitents bearing these images over carpets painstakingly designed with colored sawdust, pine needles, and flower petals
we rushing out our front door at every sound of a procession coming, we finally settling on chairs with cups of coffee in our front garden, watching for hours on end, we climbing on rooftops, trees and ladders to take pictures
processions all day and all night on Thursday, Good Friday, and “Sabado de Gloria,” incense, chanting, singing, brass instruments playing a dirge, snare drums, church bells, candles, we feeling depression
Sunday morning—after the rending dirge, we expecting unbridled oboes, and wildly improvising trumpets; everything quiet, thousands of people who line the streets yesterday now at rest—no singing woodwinds, no marimba, no trumpets, no dancing in the streets
