Greetings from the Mormon Temple

I know, I should have been marching for women's rights, but on Saturday I got to do something I have not been able to do since 1974 and am unlikely to get to do again in my life: I went inside the LDS Temple, which is briefly open to non-Mormons after its renovation until it's rededicated next month (I was there when I was seven just after it was erected, before it was first dedicated). If you've ever driven around the Capital Beltway, you've seen the building compared to both Disneyland and the Emerald City, with the angel on one of its six spires. I'd forgotten that there was a full immersion baptismal font surrounded by enormous oxen, and that weddings take place in windowless sealing rooms. 

No photos were allowed inside, but you can see some of the rooms on the Temple's web site. There are no photos of the Celestial Room that do the massive, glittering chandeliers justice, nor the one thing I vividly remembered from my childhood, the stained glass lining the main staircase that can be seen from the Beltway. The art is an entertaining combination of American masters, particularly the Hudson River School and Pre-Raphaelites, mashed up with Thomas Kinkade and children's book illustrators -- there's even a painting that's obviously Great Falls, complete with great blue herons flying over the river. The bride's room we saw has a carpet decorated with cherry blossoms. 

 I'm not really a fan of the windowless chapels and instruction rooms -- there's so much white decor that we had to wear shoe covers, but almost no natural light, and I definitely prefer the old dusty French cathedrals we visited with lots of light streaming in from outside. But it was worth going for the artwork and lighting fixtures, and the gardens (which we've only visited in the winter, when the trees are lit up and there's a live nativity scene) are beautiful, a mix of formal rows of flowers and fountains among ornamental trees backing up to Rock Creek Park, where we walked a bit after our visit and saw a deer across the creek. It was drizzling when we drove home, but lovely while we were there. 

 

We had (veggie) sausages for dinner and spent the evening catching up on the first half of the third season of Dickinson, which I always love for the performances and refusal to get bogged down in attempts at realism -- there's so much we don't know about Emily Dickinson, any sort of biopic has to make decisions based on what's in her poems and surviving correspondence, that I appreciate the exaggerated sense of disconnect with history, though I didn't like how buffoonish Walt Whitman came across and although the show is aware that it centers white people in the Civil War, it still, well, centers white people in the Civil War. Now we're watching SNL, not having its best season.