Easter for the Rest of Us

Togetherness in the electric, early days of spring

My grandma makes ambrosia salad with supremed oranges, shredded coconut and sliced pecans. The pecans are sent down in huge, heavy bags by the family who grazes cattle on the farm where she grew up. She stores them next to the washing machine on the back porch and her sister, my Great Aunt Susie, sits on the couch with a round aluminum cake tin in her lap and slices them. Tink … tink … tink … She holds each pecan between the edge of a paring knife and the pad of her thumb, little quarter-inch pieces dropping into the tin as she pushes the blade through. On Sunday nights we sit together on the couch and watch Murder She Wrote or Wheel of Fortune and Aunt Susie slices pecans.

The pecans are used for pie and cake and all sorts of other things throughout the year, but on Easter, they are used for ambrosia. We leave church and head straight for my grandmother’s two-bedroom ranch house in Alpharetta where she’s waiting on the back steps to watch me discover plastic eggs nestled in the grass. Then it’s back to crushing Ritz crackers in a ziplock bag and hugging our necks and asking my father to pull out the leaves for the dining table. A lot of people are coming and we’ll need all the room we can get. 

A small plastic bowl filled with sparkling bits of supremed oranges is set to one side on the kitchen table. She probably spent an hour that morning cutting off the pith and removing the tough membranes to release the little cells of juice inside — they roll apart and burst in my mouth.

Everyone else starts streaming through the back door a few minutes later. They knot up in the kitchen, hugging and balancing covered dishes and cakes wrapped in aluminum foil before squeezing through the swinging door into the formal room up front. I am comparing my basket of eggs with my cousins while the grownups pull out the china and the silver from the cabinet to set the table. Uncle Harry says the blessing — he was in the army and still wears his hair like he did when he was a private, only now there isn’t much left on top. The last few strands are combed into hovering arcs held fast with brill cream. His low, gravely prayer takes forever.

Green beans cooked with a ham hock, potato salad, a honey-baked ham from the strip mall that we picked up on our way and of course the ambrosia. I’d bet the same spread is on every table up and down the street. The house is small and crowded and I get tired of visiting with my older relatives and their funny smells, but more than Christmas, even more than my birthday, I remember Easter.

I remember white sun streaming through french doors, blue drenched sky and an oversized white wicker basket almost as big as me. I remember the thick cotton tights that were both too tight and too loose and the gasp of cold air shooting around my legs when I realized my mother was right and I really should have worn a coat. I remember how the booming vibration lifted me into the air as a hundred voices sang to mark the return of the son.

Faith in the big mysteries slips away quietly as we grow up — some of us replace it with tradition, others with fear and shame. These days, Christianity is more a place I’m from than a belief I hold. What was left of my religiosity got snuffed out in the last few years as I watched the people who taught me to love my neighbor kneel at the altar of self-righteousness; over and over choosing to love a doctrine instead of loving their children. I’ve had that ugly taste in my mouth too — worried it would make me complicit if I accepted the people I love underneath their corrosive beliefs. 

I start to clean up the garden on the second weekend in March. Winter wind has blown branches and leaves all over the lawn and the flower beds need fresh mulch and there are seeds to start if we want to have tomatoes in July. A week or two later, it’s time to take inventory of last year’s remaining plastic eggs. Always too many bottoms and not enough tops. Should we fill them with loose candy or stickers or pennies? How many children are coming — we need enough eggs for everyone to find about 10. A good hunt shouldn’t end too fast OR send parents home with an entire pound of jelly beans. 

I’m up before dawn to take the pork out of the fridge and prep the last set of vegetables. From the kitchen window I can see the blue of the night sky softening, and then the birds. They’ve been back since the middle of February, but there are more of them now, and louder. 

My friend Daniel and his wife come early to help hide eggs. We’re standing in the kitchen while I slice lemons for the iced tea and he asks me why a person who doesn’t seem all that into Jesus would go so hard for Easter every year. The obvious answer is because of my grandmother, but it’s more than that. Of course it’s wonderful to be with friends and family — but I don’t do it just to have a nice party. I do it because I need to stand with people I love and marvel at the gift of another year. To bask together in the electric, homecoming energy of early spring — grateful for the kept promise of the resurrecting world and lifted into the air by the vibrating anticipation of even brighter days to come. 

I hug his neck and wish him happy Easter and ask if he and my husband can go ahead and get started hiding those eggs. A lot of kids are coming and we need all the help we can get.

Friends stream up the stone path and knot up in the kitchen, hugging while balancing boxes of pastries on arms looped with diaper bags and car seats before squeezing back outside to join the hunt. Roast pork, macaroni and cheese, asparagus and braised beans. I’d bet we’re the only house on the street with a spread like this. Our congregation is likely to be Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or nothing at all, and we eat and talk with our children and sit with our faces turned to the sun, leaning back on our hands in worship.

A special thanks to

Jeannine Ouellette

and her teaching — she has shown me what can happen when we unlock our memories.

In case you missed it

✨ I have faith in nights

🫀 The underrated power of waiting to see

✨ What we lose when all we do is we win