Sunday morning gives snapshots of Annie’s and Lewee’s spiritual lives.
For Lewee, Sunday is just another Saturday. A day away from work, looking for things to do.
For Annie, it is a day of comfortable rote spirituality, anchored in the local Lutheran church in which she had been brought up. Again, Annie is more a reflection of me than is Lewee. My Minnesota experience was Presbyterian; for the setting in South Dakota I chose Lutheran. While the two denominations doubtlessly differ, I felt they had enough commonality that I could safely transpose my experiences. There is a lot to be said about Holy Redeemer Lutheran, but it needs to wait for Chapter 11, First Meetings. The reason will be clear then.
Meanwhile, we get more peeks into Lewee’s home life. Again, *way* out of my wheelhouse. Home was never like this for me and my sibs. Mother is beginning to look psychotic, till the end of the scene. Hints, then, that her irrationality might be grounded in an ill-defined “something”? I love writing scenes like this. And I try to never write them unless there is a payoff down the road.
Back to Annie and Bob. I grew up not far from railroad tracks, and I did flatten a coin or two. The wonderment of weight, and speed. Dawnings of my awareness of physics, that would play out in Within a Sheltering Darkness, and Shadows, Forward. Burned out wheel bearings, trains racing past. Echoes of things to come. For you as the reader these are for now meaningless bits of imagery. Their seeming unimportance is, to me, a critical thing. Harmless mundane things, that at a critical moment arise, and strike.