Skipping Yom Kippur

The eldest wild found a fever on Friday, and our family ritual bifurcated into the communal adherents, driving to synagogue and listening to sermons and standing and sitting and solemnity; and the fever snuggles marathon book reader and attentive mama never too far beyond reach.

I think this is the second Yom Kippur in eight years I've missed due to this girl and her ill-timed maladies. She doesn't need much now when she's sick but she always wants me right there. So: Yom Kippur in yoga pants. It's a thing now. I complied.

We read together, and read our way right into what we would have heard, more or less, in synagogue:

They all knelt down by their chairs, and Reverend Alden asked God, Who knew their hearts and their secret thoughts, to look down on them there, and to forgive their sins and help them do right. A quietness was in the room while he spoke. Laura felt as if she were hot, dry, dusty grass parching in a drought, and the quietness was a cool and gentle rain falling on her. It truly was a refreshment.

--excerpted from "On the Pilgrim Way," a chapter in By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

It wasn't the same, But a little bit it was.

She's better now. And on we go.