The Journey Through Ordinary Time

I went to church with mum yesterday. A very Poish Catholic church, I might add, one she's been going to forever, and that I guess I have to admit I was raised up in, even going to the church school for eight years.
As I was sitting there before the mass started, trying to distract myself from the wierdness of being in a church at all, I read in the church program thingy that we were now beginning the journey through ordinary time. What that means is that it's not a particularly special time, like Advent or Easter or Epiphany, etc. Yet, as I discovered when I checked it out this morning, ordinary time doesn't quite mean common. It is from the word "ordinal," which means "counted" time. The website I was perusing didn't really explain counting. Counting what? Probably the weeks until the next big show, like Advent.
In any case, it made me think that most of our time here on this planet is not party time like Christmas, or dire like Lent. It is just kind of, well, ordinary time. But, according to the church calendar anyway, it is counted. It counts. (Now the word "counts" is looking odd to me, as if perhaps I have not spelled it correctly. I guess I've used it too many times, so I'll stop.)

What occurs to me in not exactly a blinding flash is that our ordinary time matters, firstly because there is so much of it. Our journey through it ought to have some significance. Which brings me to the exercise today, which is, naturally: Ordinary Time.
Describe/draw someone you're very close to. Your spouse/child/friend/ father/mother, you get the idea. Do this exercise when the person is not present. Try for loving and positive, without getting all teary-eyed and sentimental.
Here's mine:
Mum has amazingly soft-looking skin. The skin of her face is like a kind of furrowed peach. She puts cold cream on it. No fancy potions for her. Cold cream, like many other simple things, have been good enough for her for eighty five years. There is a photo in the living room of mum and her sisters, arms entwined, around 1938. They have beautiful curling hair, puffed up around their faces. None of them look so different now, really. But mum, the oldest, has retained the most energy, the most activity. She does much of the yardwork still, trimming, watering and weeding her impatiens, the only annual she will plant. She complains about the yard all the time, but it's obvious she is pleased with it, to have it in her life yet, the same 1/2 acre yard she planned with my dad fifty years ago. Her hands are bumpy and blue-veined and arthritic, her feet are similarly afflicted, but she does not rest them much, does not give in to them. They are the cross she has to bear. Although she complains about small things, the water bill, the persistence of vines that encroach on the garden, she doesn't complain about her health. Once in awhile she'll sigh and fan herself, and say she has a headache. The extreme is "going to lay down," which again, she hardly ever does. She falls asleep at eight nearly every day while watching TV, and her head falls back, and her hands unclench, and she finally lets go of the vines and the water bill and my persistence in aggravating her and dreams then of a perfectly clean house, or a Dan Kane concert, or my dad sitting across the table from her once more...