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By Root 378 0

went to the tomb where she’d seen Joseph of Arimathea place the Lord’s body. Finding the stone rolled away and the body gone, she ran to find Peter and another disciple to tell them what had happened. The two returned with her, saw the burial linen inside the otherwise empty tomb, but then the men went home to mourn in their own ways. Mary Magdalen wept alone. When two angels appeared and asked her why she was crying, she said, “Someone has taken my Lord’s body and I do not know where.” Turning, she saw another man who asked her why she wept. Thinking he might be a gardener, she asked him if he’d seen where they’d taken the body.

The man opened his vast compassionate heart, only had to say a single word: “Mary.”

She didn’t flinch. She knew she was in her Lord’s presence. She stood, inheritor of the light, witness and herald of the new life.

“Do not cling to me,” he said, “for I am not yet ascended to the Father.”

Those seeking inner vision and the contemplative life light a candle for Mary Magdalen and whisper, “So that I may not waver at the sight of the divine.”

To honor her, learn to express your grief as well as your joy. Watch the sunrise or sunset and say out loud, “I am fully and radiantly myself, immune to slander. I offer my unique gift to the world.” Stay open to inner vision and refrain from judgment. That woman you’re calling a whore might just be the Lord’s favorite apostle, and that gardener you hope to under-pay might be God himself.

Once, when it was just me and Magdelena driving the second hatchback from Madison to Minneapolis, she insisted that we take a detour to stop at the World’s Largest Replica Cheese. She’d always had a soft place in her heart, she said, for the story of the World’s Largest Cheese—a seventeen-ton cheddar displayed for two consecutive years at the New York World’s Fair. She’d seen it once, the real cheese, when it toured America in the glass-sided Cheesemobile, and she’d always regretted having no memory of the event. She was only a baby, taken on her mother’s hip to see the grand result of the combined efforts of the Wisconsin Cheese Foundation and sixteen thousand cows. She would have preferred to stop and see the real cheese, of course, but, alas, the Wisconsin Dairymen had eaten the thing.

At least they had the heart to replace it with a replica.

We cut off the main route, headed into Neillsville. And there next to the Wisconsin Pavilion—now a radio station—we visited not one but two world’s largest things: the replica cheese and Chatty Belle, the world’s largest talking cow. The sixteen-foot fiberglass Holstein greeted us when we dropped a quarter into her voice box, saying, “Hi, so nice to see you.” And, “A cow my size would produce over two hundred seventy pounds of milk a day.”

A semitrailer housed the giant orange replica cheese. What was it made of? I thought Styrofoam, Magdelena guessed plywood.

I’m not sure why this is what I think of as I creep into Magdelena’s dressing room now, my High Sierra wildflowers drooping in their mason jar, a paltry offering. Not even close to the world’s largest anything.

She sits in front of the mirror, applying Great Lash mascara.

I thought I’d be able to tell, as soon as I saw Magdelena, whether Barbaro’s story was true or tall. Instead, I can’t seem to remember why it mattered so much. I hate it when that happens—when something that seemed so important just a few days or hours earlier suddenly loses its meaning. Her cigarette teeters at the edge of her dressing table. She circles her eyes with black liner. I try to focus, remind myself why it matters—the identity of my betrayer—but I can’t seem to manage even a humble indignation. Who is Magdelena, after all, but a girl who never meant to turn thirty? I have to admit—even if it’s only in fine print—that I’ve never known Magdelena to betray anyone at all.

When she sees me in the mirror, she sets down her kohl stick, watches me in silence like maybe she’s imagined, too, that she’d be able to tell something when she saw me, but it’s as if both our eyes are just white stones.