LEJ's Blog: 03/01/2026

~ Fiction ~

Roman à clef, cher.

Created A. I. free

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color contrast best on black screen

"Where have all the parades gone?"
photo credit: Chuck Johnson

by Leonard Earl Johnson

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

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www.LEJ.world

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LEJ's Louisiana

March 2026

The Day After Mardi Gras

Ash Wednesday

and the Forty Days of Lent

by Leonard Earl Johnson

© 2026, Leonard Earl Johnson,
All Rights Reserved

www.LEJ.world ✍

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On Ash Wednesday,

the day after Mardi Gras, all over Louisiana Carnival lifted its joyous mantle leaving Lent's ashen smudge in its place.

At Cathedrals from New Orleans to Lafayette, business suits stood cheek-by-jowl with crimson capes and smeared-lipstick ladies awaiting priests dressed in the Vestments of Sorrow, smearing The Sign of The Cross on the celebrant's forehead with thumbs dipped in the ashes of last year's Palm Sunday Palms.

Outside,

Zamboni-like street sweepers washed
the city streets, and Cajun chickens raised their necks up to see if it is safe to resume Life.

Inside,
we harbor doubts, but suffer none about this ceremony. It is Lent, and

To ashes we are returning.

Banana Tree / photo credit: Deb Kohler

Lent is the strangest contradiction in all the Christian calendar. It celebrates for forty days everything the King Cake Baby Jesus grew up opposing. Yet it is the longest 'holiday' of the entire liturgical calendar.

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Should you need a reason to be suspicious of evangelical religion's temporal powers consider that.

Carnival's pleasurable time shrinks by measure of the inaccurate Gregorian Calendar so as to accommodate lengthening Lent to forty days at all cost.
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Lent is codified into Canon Law so as to never lose one penitent day of suffering. Not so with Carnival's time of joy.

"In such order we find sad truths,"
L. A. Norma.

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Clearing the Liturgical Air

Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) is the last day of Carnival.

Next day, Ash Wednesday

is the first day of Lent's never-changing season of suffering.

"The Gregorian Calendar," L. A. Norma explains to a bewildered tourist sharing our pedicab,
"what with Easter changing with the moon, is none too accurate!

"For instance, in the secular world you have leap year!"

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Easter Sunday, at the end of the Forty Days, marks Lent's end and welcomes Spring as Easter, a Christianized holiday with customs 'borrowed' by the ancient marauding legions of Rome. Borrowed from religious customs they happened upon that had been beating their own drums long before Christianity went on the road.

Spring/Easter may be the oldest human celebration, calculated (or miscalculated) into Canon Law with those aforementioned instruments created out of faith in suffering and suspicion of pleasure.

Beansprout

Suffering is not to be monkeyed with in these theological calculations. Carnival's pleasures, however, are reducible, by God or His agent's with their inaccurate stopwatches.

Lenten fasting knits Carnival's raveled sleeve and prepares us for Spring's rebirth. Like the bean sprout and the jazz man say:

"Blow the roof off the sucker"

𝅘𝅥𝅮🎷🎜🎝🎺𝅘𝅥𝅯

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It has been a good Lent so far this year, with sunny mornings and a warm place in the kitchen to read Internet newspapers and sip coffee. As dark clouds gather round the sun, blown in on Trumped-up winds.

Photo credit: Eric Douglas

The live oaks outside our dormer windows are a soft young green. Live oaks don't dump their leaves till Spring's new buds arrive (as followers of JFK conspiracies will readily tell you). Then they change from old dark green to young soft green almost overnight.

Today, soft-green rules coastal Louisiana and we old alligators lie on the banks in whatever sun we can find, dreaming of Easter baskets and Spring.

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