The first thing I did was check on the compost.
We’re making compost again this year. I like composting almost better than gardening. Composting is a puzzle that, when done just right, doesn’t attract flies or leave a smell. It’s just a mound of beautiful brown loam tucked into that odd corner of the house between the porch and the wall. Turn it over and it’s warm inside, warm as a bath. With our stalking neighbor’s increasing derangement I wasn’t able to feed the compost heap the past couple of years. I was barely allowed in my yard. But she hasn’t come out since January. The yard is quiet now–blissfully, impossibly quiet. I’ve almost stopped having panic attacks when I go outside. So last night, in the cool air of a dark clear evening, I buried a bucket of eggshells, coffee grounds and vegetable scraps under a big pile of used guinea pig litter. I covered it all with a patchwork of old cardboard to wait for the rain.
Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain expectation of the resurrection to eternal life.
The compost heap was unchanged since last night. The rain hadn’t hit yet.
I instinctively looked from my compost heap to my neighbor’s property. Her precious lawn she mowed twice a week was dotted with beautiful dandelions. The ornamental bench on the porch was knocked over. Her great big philodendron in the window was dead. The “PSALM 91 AMEN!” signs she pasted in the windows, after the police made her take down the signs with obscene words on them, were still there, but covered in dust bunnies. I didn’t think of Psalm 91. I thought of another passage.
I will sing to the LORD, for He is highly exalted. The horse and rider He has thrown into the sea. The LORD is my strength and my song, and He has become my salvation. He is my God, and I will praise Him, my father’s God, and I will exalt Him.
I went for my walk, around the alley and out to the wealthy side of the neighborhood.
Everyone’s yard looked beautiful. The unkempt yards were beautiful with violets and Creeping Charley. The stately lawns were beautiful with tulips and mother-of-thyme. Lilac buds were opening weeks early. The blossoming trees hadn’t yet dropped all their flowers. Fat, noisy bumblebees browsed everywhere. Children played outside on every corner. The air was heavy with noise and perfume and humidity, and all was alive, and all was well.
I arrived at the row of mansions in the wealthy strip of LaBelle just at noon.
There were four enormous brown birds perched right in the road– brown birds of prey with bars on their backs. At first, I thought they were hawks like my friend the red-shouldered hawk or the other hawk that keeps swooping over LaBelle.
Then the clocks downtown started ringing the Angelus.
Angelus Domini nunciabit Maria, et concepit in Spiritui Sancto, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
No, that’s not right. In the Easter season, you don’t pray the Angelus at Noon. You pray the Regina Caeli.
It wasn’t just the Catholic church. There’s a long row of beautiful churches on Fourth Street in Steubenville: the stuffy traditional Catholic church, two Orthodox churches, an Episcopal church, a Presbyterian church, a Salvation Army, two or three non-denominational Protestant churches, and most of those have bells. They don’t always ring the Angelus. But it was not only noon, it was noon on a Sunday, and that Sunday was Orthodox Easter, so every church in town that had a bell rung them gloriously.
Christós anésti ek nekrón,
thanáto thánaton patísas,
ké tís en tís mnímasi,
zoín charisámenos!
Up and down downtown they pealed, the noise rising up to the cliffs of LaBelle, echoing off the sandstone across the Ohio in terrible Weirton. A cacophony in honor of the Blessed Virgin and the Resurrection and the fact that worship services were letting out for the day.
Regina caeli, laetare, alleluia,
Quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia,
Resurrexit sicut dixit, alleluia,
Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia.
The birds rose, perhaps startled by the noise, but they didn’t leave LaBelle. They remained. They soared in wide spirals just over the place I was standing– above the cliff, above the tall sycamores lining the cliff, above the rich people’s houses, above the middle class houses and back to the cliff. Every time I thought they’d stop in a tree so I could take a picture to look up in a bird book, they swept around again. Every time I thought they’d mount to the air and be impossible to see, they darted lower. One of them came at me until I thought it would stab my face with its beak. One dipped so low I thought it would claw my hair. But each time they rose up again at just the right moment, borne on the hot updrafts.
Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”
When they swooped low, I saw the bright red heads and staring eyes.
They weren’t hawks, but vultures.
They must have been perching on a dead thing.
The bells pealed on and on, dying off one by one. The last one to stop was a Protestant church whose bells were playing an off-key rendition of Yes, Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so.
Now, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,
and that through this belief you may have life in his name.
I watched the vultures until they went south, down toward Brilliant and Martin’s Ferry and out of sight.
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In