Don’t worry. Didn’t die. Did fall asleep for a couple of days, and probably will spend a portion of today recumbent and comatose. Good thing Easter is a whole season, or I wouldn’t have noticed it when it passed by on Sunday. Fortunately it goes on for weeks and weeks.
There are all kinds of scenes from the week I could divulge, like the fact that every year I forget that I am allergic to lilies and spend a day and a half picking them up and moving them around and watering them and rubbing my face in them. By Sunday morning my eyes are a bright, cheerful, if alarming pinkish red, such as you would see on signs in those seedier parts of town, and simultaneously swollen and beady, if that’s even possible.
Or the strange happiness of finding the familiar sense of my being a Bad Mother in Holy Week beginning to diminish. It used to be that a lovely babysitter would come to the house Wednesday through Saturday. I would kiss the children fondly and not see them for what felt like an eternity. The week after Easter was therefore meant to remind us all that the apocalypse had not yet dawned. We still had each other. As they got older I dispensed with the babysitter and drug them along, bedding them down in the front pew during the Vigil, making them be there, making them acolyte. But there was always some sense of loss as the intense life of the church took over everything. It took at least a week to remind ourselves that we were all still living.
But the last two years there’s been a shift. Everyone is old enough to go to every service. And at the Vigil I happened to look up and discover that we were all there, distributed in the choir and on the altar, lugging crosses and candles up and down, languishing in the darkness of Old Testament before the lights came on. Back and forth we went together every day, and talked and hung around. I wasn’t all by myself shoving around furniture in the Sunday school rooms. I didn’t have to clunk up and down the stairs a thousand times. There was always a kid there to do it for me.
Someone pointed out on Sunday that what I’m doing is very bad. They’ve all become helpful and interesting. And now that I’m getting used to it and starting to depend on them, they are all going to leave me, and it’s going to be worse than before. I can see that this is true and I’ve decided to devote a portion of every day to anxious worry over that inescapable future moment.
But I think the most important thing to mention is The Trifle, or, what the children keep calling it, The Truffle.
Easter dinner is always kind of a dicey proposition for me. Will I even be awake for it? Matt always roasts some paschal portion of lamb, and potatoes, and peas or something, although this year was Brussels sprouts, but then it’s up to me to consider a dessert.
Incidentally, I wish Americans would adopt the Brittish word “pudding” since I can’t possibly remember whether its “desert” or “dessert.”
I feel strongly that Easter should include some kind of lemony concoction. I’ve tried chocolate desserts for the resurrection but it just feels wrong. I always find I wanted a lemon cake or a tart. This year the question sat in the darker portion of my soul for most of the week, and then on Thursday for, as Marigokd would say, no apparent reason, I was possessed of a fit during which, for the first time in my life, I managed to bake a rather too flat genoise sponge and whip up a really luxurious lemon curd. On Saturday afternoon I lathered cherry liquor all over the sponge and cut it into strips and layered it with blackberry jam, the lemon curd, thinly sliced kiwi fruit, and then finally a whole bucket of cream. Half way through it occurred to me that I should have consulted a recipe and that this is not really how a trifle should be, and where was the custard, Shouldn’t There Be Custard. But in the end, after mellowing in the fridge for the night, it turned out to be the perfect combination and balance of flavors. And, I’m sorry to say, there isn’t any left.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I will just lay my head back on this pillow just for a minute.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In