A calendar year has four seasons, and depending on where you live the differences among them can be sharp or subtle. In central Pennsylvania our weather is most often behind or ahead of the season change. As I noted recently, we've sometimes had our most severe winter weather in the ten days before and after the start of spring.

Today marks the beginning of the Christian liturgical season of Lent. Yesterday was "Fat Tuesday," Mardi Gras, noted in our Pennsylvania German-influenced culture with the consumption of fastnachts, the traditional glazed doughnut. I've written about this before, and my access logs show dozens of visits in the last few days from search strings on variations of "Fastnacht Day."

Last December, at the beginning of the liturgical season of Advent, I made a chart of how my inner and outer lives combine to afford me six distinct seasons. I begin with Winter, which lasts from the Feast of Stephen (December 26) to Ash Wednesday. From Ash Wednesday to Easter I have Lent. Spring goes from Easter until "Outta There," the last day of school, which this year is June 10. My summer stretches twelve weeks to Labor Day, my autumn the eleven weeks to Thanksgiving, when I enter Christmas, my final season.

Last year about this time I wrote about what people commonly understand by the word "noise," intrusive sounds that assault the ear and tax the spirit. That was an incident where my church neighbor held a program where the joyful noise unto the Lord got really loud and lasted past midnight. It marked the beginning of my awareness that development in this township is veering out of control (that is, veering closer and closer to my house rather than somebody else's). There's a highway hum that I can hear all the time now since another patch of woods has been cleared for housing, and traffic is so heavy on the main road past our neighborhood that a lot of people think we need a light to get in and out of our street.

I'm living with the thought that someday I might have to change my life, since I can't do much to change the course of development. This causes me some level of stress. I looked for ways to manage or reduce that stress, and I came to understand that there is noise in my life other than the aural kind, and that I can do something about that.

I grew up in a tradition that promotes giving something up for Lent, such as candy or a favorite TV program, as an aid to spiritual housecleaning. I've decided to do some actual housecleaning, and give up some of the visual and physical "noise" in my life caused by what someone once termed my "amazing clutter," things I've accumulated. I have a lot of "stuff" I certainly don't need, can't use, and don't really want anymore. Some of it consists of books and educational materials I've outgrown, and I've started passing on those items to my writing classmates for whom the material is fresh and useful.

A lot of it, however, is "stuff" that supports something I once did or represents something I once thought I was but no longer have room for in my life as my priorities shift. And a lot of that noisy "stuff" is sewing and craft materials and equipment that I once used every day but no longer have the time and attention for. Most of it is stored haphazardly in a large hall closet and the small closet in my study.

If I devote one hour a day through Lent to "redding out" all this stuff I probably won't be finished, but I will have made progress, and I might even discover that I miss that crafty person I was enough to make her productive again.