“What’s all this business about a volcano in Iceland blowing up?” Margaret, visiting from the Moon in the Mango Tree, lounges in a chair by the window, in the most appealing light. Ted eyes her, as always.

“Thousands of people are grounded in airports,” Emily from Walk Back The Cat, and soon, Secret of the Shroud, says. “It’s a catastrophe.”

“Fire and Ice–it’s very poetic,” Barbara Perkins says. “Apparently a volcano exploded beneath a glacier in Iceland.”

News of world chaos over the recent volcanic eruption in Iceland reminded me of another enormous one 4000 years ago that may have evidenced God’s wrath during the time of Moses. The eruption, one of the largest in recorded history, wiped out the advanced Minoan civilization on the Greek Islands of Crete and Thera (today, Santorini). It’s even possible that this is the lost civilization Plato described as Atlantis. Many Biblical archeologists and historians believe that effects of the huge Minoan eruption are mentioned in the book of Exodus when God commanded Pharaoh to let his people go. Recall the turmoil, the plagues that followed Pharaoh ignored God’s demand–water, blood, frogs, dust, lice, hail, darkness–a thick darkness in the land of Egypt for three days.

Ashes from the Icelandic volcano have now spread throughout the North Atlantic and over Northern Europe. According to recent news reports, ash plumes reach as high as 55,000 feet in the air. Ash from the Minoan explosion during Old Testament times caused even greater damage, more widespread destruction. In Egypt archeologists and historians believe that it could have brought not only darkness laden with particles of ash and other debris mentioned in Exodus, but also drastic climate changes, disrupting the entire ecosystem in the area. Ashes from the Minoan volcano have been found as far away as California in growth rings of redwood trees.

Leo has entered the room. One way to stop a good party anytime is to have Leo enter the room.

“That’s not very nice,” Emily snaps. I jump. How’d she know what I was thinking?

“Guess,” she says in a tone I think is a little bit sarcastic. “You’re The Writer…aren’t you?” She looks at me and squints, as though she’d never really seen me from this perspective before.

“Yes, I am,” I say, a little chagrined. I’d hoped to keep a low profile back here behind the mirror. But I just get excited, and when I get that way the words just jump out of my mind before I can control them.

“The mirror’s open, yet people are peeking in. What’s up?” Emma Mamsey’s eyes are wide and shining as she looks around our secret garden. The books are closed and readers should be asleep. “Looks like a party. What are we celebrating, Mrs. Breeden?”

“The writer’s launching a website.” Amalie Breeden’s voice runs up and down the scale as she bustles around, getting things ready.

“What’s a website?”

Amalie shrugs. “How should I know? That’s what happens when The Writer mixes up our times. Ask someone from Dancing On Glass, or Walk Back The Cat. They’re much more modern than we are.”

Last weekend, my husband Jimmy and I spent five days in New Orleans at the Tennessee Williams Festival. We live in the metro area of the Big Easy – north of Lake Pontchartrain, 20 minutes from the city over the causeway. But we stayed at the Royal Sonesta in the French Quarter, where the festival was headquartered because there are parties and plays and all kinds of things going on at night during the festival as well as daytime–music, plays, dress-ups at the New Orleans Historic Collection museum on Royal Street.

It was colder than usual, but beautiful sunshiny days. There were street musicians everywhere, so you almost had to dance down the street. Flowers, balloons, red and white lucky dog carts, crazy hats, mimes, weird costumes. A random food festival popped up all down Royal Street with booths and samplings from every great restaurant in town. We even have the coolest police station in the middle of the Quarter. It’s the only police station I’ve ever seen that has an outdoor cafe attached to it so you can rest and do some people watching, and blues drifting from a speaker in the courtyard, and sometimes BBQ’s and boiling pots of seafood outside!

It seems beyond coincidence to me that just at this moment with turmoil swirling around us–joblessness, the situation in Iran, the economy in general, corruption in politics–that so much new evidence emerges that the Shroud could be…and maybe was…the burial cloth of Jesus. Here we are the day before Easter and it’s possible to believe that we’ve been given the greatest gift of all, an image on a linen cloth from 2000 years ago showing us the face of the Messiah! Proof that the resurrection occurred–that life extends into eternity!

Last week the History Channel showed an astounding documentary on the three-dimensional aspect of the Shroud. Scientists and photographers and computer experts worked together on a project that proved the image on the Shroud was not created by any technique known to science, and that it is not only a negative image (as in a photograph) where others are positive, but it is also three-dimensional, unlike any other in the world. A photograph of the Shroud was studied using sophisticated instruments that created a topical map of the distance between each part of the body image to the cloth covering it when the image was formed– sort of a mathematical map.