Holy. Wholly.

I speak with my old friend, Marijean, today.  She is not far away in Dubai but at home with her mother in Devon, only one state away. A serendipitous accident. Her mother and my mother are the same age.  I am glad my mother is not living through this pandemic.  I think it might frighten her, though she practiced social distance for the last decade or so of her life, preferring to watch her small slice of the world through the window next to her recliner.  When we lived on the East Coast, we always went to see her for Easter.  Not church, but lunch—asparagus, the good china, an assemblage of relatives.  Since she died, we haven’t paused for Easter.  We tend, however, to gather for Passover with Seth’s family or with our daughters, wherever they are.  Today, speaking with Marijean, we talk about living in this time of paradox—death is all around us, death and fear.  But so is spring, the resurgence of nature, the magnolia buds bursting forth.  Death is a part of life.  We have always known that, but this year, that knowledge feels closer. 

 Palm Sunday.  The little palm cross, small enough to fit in my hand, is dry, a faded green, a talisman.  I loved that little palm, tucked one into the mirror on my bureau, replacing it with a fresh one year after year.  But yesterday, the day after our Zoom Seder, I think about that little cross and that Jesus was forced to carry the cross on which he would be crucified up a hill.  It’s a horrible symbol. My son asks me to explain Easter and I give him a thumb nail sketch, pausing on “My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me.” A real hero, in religion of literature, reveals vulnerability, I explain, always the English teacher. That doubt Christ experienced, that crisis, feels so human.

An attack of vertigo this week upended me literally. On Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, our Jewish family rituals supplanting the WASPy practices of my girlhood, I think about how pagan the spring celebrations are:  eggs, herbs, rebirth.  I love these rituals, but I am eager to move through through all the pain, all the tests, the betrayals, the plagues. I am weary of my own discomfort.  Let’s get past the exodus, the crucifixion and get to the good stuff:  freedom, resurrection, family dinners with brisket or lamb or chocolate bunnies whose heads we bite off with cannibalistic delight.  Easter and Passover during Covid 19 feel surreal—as if we are, in our isolation, weirdly in a new world.  The hyacinths, admittedly more spindly than the ones in the grocery stores, rise in the center of the garden.  Deer and squirrels steal the snow drop bulbs, the crocus bulbs, the tulip bulbs, but leave the daffodils and hyacinths behind, graceful, resilient, fragrant. 

Holy.  Wholly. To care for the whole of a community, not to put one’s own well-being above that of the whole.  So easy to preach.  So hard to do.  I am wholly in favor of social distance.  But I forget to wash off the mail.  I forget these new rules, remember old ones.  In my head as I peel garlic or set up another Zoom meeting, I hear my mother singing, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God almighty.”  She has been dead almost exactly ten years, but all week, I have heard these hymns I thought I had forgotten.  Words float back, unbidden.  I hum the melodies, mix them up with Dayenu to entertain myself.  

 The other night, I couldn’t sit at our Zoom seder for long; the dizziness came in waves and I needed to lie down.  I listened from the living room, happy that the children had put this enterprise together—mostly for their grandmother, Seth’s mother, who is 92.  But the blessings and the laughter of another faith weirdly make me miss my own mother.  My first seder was about 100 years ago in Long Island at Seth’s Aunt Ursula’s house.  She died this fall.  No one speaks of her, but I am missing her, missing her unconditional love for my husband and missing my own mom.  I listen to the Haggadah that we wrote before we even had children.  I think of other seders, bringing together our Jewish and non-Jewish friends, cooking in tiny Manhattan apartments, and then I recall a seder my mother, remarkably attended, in our tiny walk up apartment when Miranda, our oldest daughter, was a toddler.  It’s like a gift to have that memory float up.

 Yesterday, according to Facebook, was sibling day, and my sister posted a great photograph of the two of us from a few years ago.  I’m too ill to do more than repost it on my own page.  I wonder vaguely why I rarely post any pictures of my brother.  His loss thrums through all my writing.  This morning, feeling a little better, I look around the house.  There are pictures of my brother—my favorite features him sporting a huge bandage on his forehead.  School picture day must have followed his run-in with a stone wall, an event I remember because my mother dumped me at the neighbor’s house on her way to Bryn Mawr Hospital to have his forehead stitched up.  There are several pictures of Lee with Rod in matching outfits.  But I cannot find any pictures of me with him.  It bothers me.  I’ve been working on an essay about catching newts with him at North Mountain, the fishing stream, but I’m stuck trying to figure out the essay’s shape.  Is it that I am looking for myself with my brother? 

 I remember Easter preparations with him, remember distinctly Rod being with me.  On Saturday, we’d dye at least two dozen eggs.  I loved dropping each little pellet of color into a Pyrex Jello cup. I remember Rod lifting the teakettle and pouring boiling water in to mix with the vinegar he had allowed me to spoon into the cups.  The color fizzed up like the Fizzies we sent him at summer camp.  The colors were so saturated, so promising and ultimately a cheat, much more vivid than any egg I ever dyed.  We held the eggs with a little wire holder and drew on them with a wax crayon or we rolled them with our fingers, turning our index fingers green and purple.  The decals were always dumb and never stuck.  Rod had more patience than I did, rolling the egg in the dye longer, his eggs a deeper hue than my faded pastels. 

 I remember it was often too cold for the new Easter dress that I wore to church.  Ruffled socks.  Mary janes.  Hair combed.  Rod in a jacket.  Lili in a grown-up dress. Daddy dapper. Mommy smelling of perfume in the chilly spring, her hanky and peppermints in her bag, requisite church accessories.

Baskets.  The baskets lived somewhere between Easters.  On the third floor?  Each basket sported cellophane green grass, a sugar egg with a scene, the frosting hardened into ceramic.  I wanted fancy hollow eggs or eggs with Ukrainian designs, but we had plastic eggs with Hershey kisses tucked inside.  Once we tried blowing eggs—our Aunt Nancy did it and her eggs were glorious, quivering on an indoor tree.  She had a gift.  Our experiment was unsuccessful. I keep a few of those small eggs in a cabinet here in Shaker Heights, a talisman of childhood. They lived high on a pantry shelf through a glass door during the off season in Haverford.

 “It’s like another Christmas stocking,” Seth said in some disgust as I prepared elaborate baskets for our girls when they were small.. 

“Yes,” I grinned.  I love any reason for presents.

 One year, Mom had us each make a basket for each other.  Lee and I went to Woolworths and got Rod a turtle.  I had fuzzy hang ten red socks in an egg in my basket one year.  Their faded glue imprint still adheres to the chiffonier in our hall in Ohio. I do not know what happened to the little turtle. 

 Daddy hid the eggs after church. Dye had seeped from the cold eggs into the base of each egg’s cardboard compartment.  He nestled one the pachysandra, another in the ivy, others in Mom’s garden, in between tulip leaves or blending in with hyacinths, and one in a drainpipe, discovered weeks later.  I do remember searching, gleeful when I found one that my brother or sister had missed.

 And then there’s this memory—a single memory though maybe we did it more than once.  We painted eggs at Aunt Janie’s with model race car paints and tiny brushes.  The older kids or Aunt Janie, herself, made a gold egg and a silver egg; there were cash prizes if you found those on the hunt!  My brother Rod carefully designed an egg with the saturated enamels he had brought from his race car track in the basement.  This egg was much fancier than our pallid ones from home.  I can see the operation in the kitchen—Kathy and Johnny and Chucky and Rod and Brinton and Lee and Netchen—the children of my childhood along with the Williams, but I don’t think they were on the scene then. I have no idea if we were all there, but I remember that Mercer and I were not allowed to paint with the fancy tiny bottles.  We were too little, too clumsy.  Where were Aunt Janie and Aunt Nancy and Mom?  Having a cocktail in another room?  Happy to have us all occupied?

 Brinton told me recently, on Facebook, where we hunted for those fancy eggs down a path behind Aunt Janie’s house.  It was hugely exciting.  I do not remember finding any.

 Across the street at our grandparents, there was formal Easter Lunch—roast leg of lamb, potatoes and creamed onions, asparagus, mint jelly.  A children’s table.  And egg cracking, fat end to fat end.  Even after my grandmother died, we always cracked eggs.  When I taught Seth this bizarre family tradition, he immediately won, beating all of us one rainy spring Easter at Mom’s condo.

 The years slip and slide along with my vertigo this spring. My childhood, my children’s childhood, traditions we’ve shared, those we no longer keep, ones we have yet to create.  Old friends.  Powerful connections.  The strangeness of the pandemic and our distance from the people we love bring memories swimming to the surface. Wholly.  Holy.  How best to care for the whole on this Easter day?