Easter Greetings!

What are some of your Easter memories? I remember...

 

There was almost always a new spring dress for Easter, and new strap Sunday shoes, purchased after a deadly dull trip downtown to look at only clothes and shoes. I hated the early skirts of my childhood, which were stiffened with starched tulle slips and itched abominably. New Sunday shoes hurt, too. Had I grown over the year I would also get a new Easter hat, usually along the line of an old-fashioned bonnet or straw boater, with flowers on it (how annoying that awful elastic band that kept it firmly anchored to your head, but irritated the skin in the fold between your head and your neck!), and a new spring coat in a suitably spring color: pale yellow, pink, pale blue, and the most memorable one, a woven fabric of spring green, with saucer-like buttons down the front (see photo below from May 1967, I am eleven).

 

Mom would have baked Easter goodies: perhaps some wine biscuits for me, but more "spring" type baked goods: egg biscuits, finished with a light sugar glaze and sprinkles on top; almond bars for dad. She would also make a rice pie, which was, as you might guess, made with rice, with sugar and eggs. No top crust; it looked like a custard pie.

 

On Good Friday she would shut the TV off from noon to three, the hours Jesus was on the cross, and say her rosary and read the Bible. I was expected to be quiet, too, and occupied myself perhaps with reading my children's Bible, or coloring quietly, later just reading.

 

At the grocery store earlier she would have bought all the goodies for Easter dinner: a very small Virginia brown sugar ham, some potatoes, some type of vegetable, and we had the rice pie or the cookies for dessert. We might have already watched some religious films on TV: Barabbas with Anthony Quinn, or The Robe, and there would be just some generic Catholic films on as well, like Sally and Saint Anne, The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, Song of Bernadette, Going My Way. Our Easter lily, in a ceramic pot wrapped with pastel colored foil, sat on the front steps, and we still had the vase of pussy willows Uncle Guido brought us every spring sitting on the kitchen table.

 

Sunday began with 10:15 Mass, upstairs, a High Mass, which meant we could sing along with the choir, but it wouldn't do much good as we would have been drowned out. There were usually three priests officiating, Father Bernasconi as the main celebrant, and the scent of incense drowning out anything else, from the big waxy-white Easter lilies with their pale yellow throats on the altar to the lily and carnation corsages our mothers wore. All the responses were sung, so High Mass took a while, and since you'd been fasting since you woke up, so you could receive Communion, everyone would be very hungry once Mass let out at 11:30. You had to file out decorously, shaking hands with Father on the way out—and then bunches of people made tracks to Solitro's Bakery, one block down, to pick up some pastry for the afternoon. The line would snake out the front door and down the street. Everyone else was in the parking lot, waiting in or near their car, for the people in front of them to quit hugging and kissing friends and get in their cars to go home.

 

Easter dinner was at noon or thereafter: the sweet, succulent ham, warmed up in the oven with brown sugar and canned pineapple in juice, the potatoes, the veg. As on all Sundays, we would probably go for "a ride" after dinner: this was usually up to Diamond Hill or down to Oakland Beach, or out to Scituate and drive around the reservoir, but on Easter Sunday we joined the long, long lines going through the big black iron gates at the entrance to Roger Williams Park on Elmwood Avenue to take photos with the new beds of colorful tulips and hyacinths and crocuses, a riot of scarlet and saffron, lilac and orange, lavender and white, or else to the Japanese garden if the weather had been warm enough—alas, there were Easter Sundays, especially in March, where we went to church in winter coats and clothes—and the flowering trees were in bloom, branches snowy in white or looking like cotton candy in pink. Sometimes we would also walk in the zoo and pet the farm animals, still shaggy with winter coats.

 

Then about 4 or later, it was off to Papà's house where Aunty Margaret had fragrant coffee waiting along with her nicely decorated trays of cookies: more egg biscuits, some of them finished with sparkly silver dragées; the inevitable little torrone pieces in their colorful boxes; struffoli basted in honey and sprinkled with tiny multicolor candy periods, and wandi doused in confectioners' sugar (the latter two probably ordered beforehand from a bakery, as they were time-consuming to make); and even Easter-colored wrapper Hershey's kisses. Even with all this bounty, someone had evidently gone earlier to one of the numerous bakeries in the Silver Lake neighborhood like Crugnale's or Scialo's and there were pastries: lemon squares, sfogliatelles, cannoli, New Yorkers... Oh, and pizza strips! I called it "bakery pizza," and every Italian bakery had them: rectangular pans with pizza crust covered in pizza sauce. No cheese, just goodness.

 

When we got home there was this year's Easter basket to look forward to. We did not dye eggs in our house. Nobody ate hard-boiled eggs and they would have had to be thrown out; as teens in the Depression and conserving food during the second World War, my parents refused to waste food. I usually got an Easter basket Mom had put together. I wasn't allowed jelly beans or Peeps (nothing pure sugar, and I disliked them anyway), but there was the nice basket; Easter grass for a colorful bedding (the basket and the grass were stored in the attic and used year after year); a few plastic eggs with faux gold coins in them; usually a new stuffed Easter bunny, each year in a different color: white, pink, pale blue—the bunnies stopped when I was twelve and finally received my favorite one, a brown-and-white rabbit that looked almost like the real thing; I named him Harold J. Rabbit, "Hoppy" for short); small solid-chocolate eggs with colorful foil wrappers that I carefully removed, flattened, and used to make Christmas ornaments from; and of course a big Peter Rabbit, a hollow chocolate Easter bunny. This I would nibble on successive days during the week, from the tail to the ears, until it was all gone.

Happy Easter!

Equinox-Time

"Instructions on Not Giving Up"
Ada Limón, 1976

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

March Forth

Will you tell me how on earth it is March already? The days fly by since I've retired, even when all I'm doing is listening to podcasts while cleaning house. It's 3:30 already as I write this and I haven't even vacuumed yet.

February was a full month, thankfully without disasters. James did have one doctor's appointment and next week must have a skin cancer removed through a MOHS procedure. We are crossing our fingers about this. Mostly we have watched the weather get warmer and warmer (it was high 60s some days and a couple of low 70s, too) and the trees starting to bud, and the blossoms everywhere: the Bradford pear trees have already turned to white snowballs and are leafing out, and the flowering cherries and plums are bright pink and purple, and the yellow blaze of forsythia here and daffodils there is quite daunting. The purple and white magnolia tree up the street has not only bloomed but is already scattering petals to the strong wind. Ironically we are having another cold front this week—well, until the weekend, when it will go back to 60s, but then it will rain. It seems that it has done nothing but rain, and it always rains on the weekend. We had a cloudy but dry day on Saturday, but had to race a rainstorm home yesterday (and south of here the storms swarmed angrily and formed tornadoes). I'm not sure why everyone wants spring so badly when all it does is make us sneeze and brings alive the threat of tornado sirens heralding disaster.

I didn't even get a Rudolph Day post done for February (I was reading Emlyn Williams' Southern Christmas which is full of the flower blooms that are traditional of southern holiday decorations, perfect for the springing of spring, but I never finished it), it zipped by that quickly. It's almost time for this blog to go semi-dormant. Heck, next Sunday is the annual travesty of turning the clocks forward, which drives me bonkers. All winter when he's gone to work James has had to use the floodlights on the driveway to be able to see when he mounts the power chair on the truck. Now that it's finally light enough in the morning for him to see without the lights, we're going to push the dang clock forward an hour, meaning it will be pitch dark at seven in the morning again. The sun won't rise until almost eight, which is stupid.

I pray for a happy March.

Happy Easter!

 

Around the Seasons With the Clarks

Between 1947 and 1956, Vermonter Frances Frost wrote four "Windy Foot" books about a (presumably) Vermont farm family that saw them around the year, starting at the late summer/early fall county fair, continuing at Christmas and in the spring, and ending on Independence Day. They are not only fun to read, but give a picture of a bygone era: a family-run farm rather than a giant agrobusiness; living with only electricity and a telephone and a radio, with food cooked on a woodstove and winter heat provided by the stoves and a fireplace; one vehicle only, otherwise the family uses horses for transportation; lots of hard work but lots of fun times, too: community dances and carol sings, fairs, parties with dancing and games, sleigh rides, skiing, hikes in the woods, stargazing, fishing.

Modern-day children reading the books will also be surprised and perhaps aghast at the freedoms allowed in those days. Lead character Toby is twelve and can be entrusted with driving his little sister back and forth to school many miles each day as well as taking care of the titular pony, Windy Foot. He chops wood and helps his father milk cows, can be trusted to stay home and guard the animals with a small rifle when a bear prowls around, can properly tap maple trees and is learning to boil sap to make maple syrup. Even more amazing, he and his nine-year-old sister are allowed to snowshoe and hike in the woods alone, no one worries when they drive into town and back that they might be assaulted or the buggy might turn over. Toby is allowed to defend himself in a fight with a bully and his mother doesn't panic and immediately rush him to a hospital; neither does six-year-old Johnny get rushed to the doctor when he falls off the banister while sliding down the stair rails and gets a bump on his head.

I read the first two of these books in elementary school and found the third some years later. I didn't even know the fourth existed until I saw it on the internet and hunted down a copy. A city kid, I lived vicariously through Toby and his friend Tish: horseback riding! gathering Christmas greens in the woods! carol singing around a big community tree! maple sugar parties! I was less enamored by the youngest Clark sibling, little Johnny who makes up rhymes when he's happy; sometimes I just wished he'd shut up, just like a real older sister.

While all the books describe some seasonal happiness—and the occasional seasonal drawback, like a broken leg from skiing—the most exciting and the saddest of the books, Maple Sugar for Windy Foot, takes place in the spring, from before St. Patrick's Day to Easter Sunday. It opens with busy times on the farm: the first sugar snow has fallen! Those unfamiliar with maple syrup production may not know this process happens in the early spring when the days start to get warm, but snow is still on the ground and nights are cold. The sap in the maple trees begins to run before the trees bud (once the tree buds the process is stopped so the tree may grow) and it is then when sugaring off begins.

Today the process has been simplified: clear plastic tubing runs from each of the "tapped" maple trees to a vat where the sap is collected; when enough sap is collected it is run through pipes to a facility that does so. There is less skimming and cleaning of the sap needed because it goes directly from tree to vat.

Maple Sugar For Windy Foot illustrates the old-fashioned way of sugaring off, when for several weeks in March the family with the "sugarbush" had little sleep. Everyone pitched in to tap the trees (you tried not to tap the same trees every year, to give a chance for the tapped trees to heal), hang tin buckets (early in the century the buckets would have been wooden) under the tap, and check the buckets several times a day, using an old-fashioned yoke and a team of horses pulling a small sledge (better for traveling in the woods than a vehicle) to transport the sap to a log sugarhouse near the maple grove. Twenty-four hours a day, the sap would be boiled at a very specific temperature so that the water evaporated and the sweet maple syrup remained. The person boiling the sap had to know his business. The sap had to be skimmed and then strained multiple times before it was fit for human consumption.

When "sugaring off" was over, then it was time to play. In the book, Toby and sister Betsy invite classmates and their schoolteachers over for a sugaring off party, where the kids poured hot maple syrup on snow to make delicious toffee-like candy, and also ate doughnuts and sour pickles to offset the sweet. (You will probably read these books amazed at all the food Toby eats; he already has a stereotypical teenage appetite. All the kids seem to eat a ton, and then they go outside and exercise it off. Overweight people are rare in this era's farm country!) After eating they play games and dance.

This happy opening gives no clue to what will happen once sugaring season is over and the snow begins to melt. Runoff and days of rain bring the river that passes through the Clark property to higher and higher levels. At first it only overflows its banks and wets a bit of the farm property. But it keeps raining...and raining. The fields are covered and now the water begins to creep up to the house, and the barn. The whole family works together to save their animals and themselves...but there may be no way to save their property.

When the crisis comes, both Toby and Windy Foot do their part in averting a total family disaster as well as helping their neighbors. Unlike the other books, which have minor crises as part of the plot (an exciting rescue after a skiing accident, a family member's injury, an attempt at sabotage in a sporting event, a lesson for Toby), this episode in the lives of the Clarks will touch your heart and make you cry. For a spring story with a difference, this one can't be beat.

Sugaring Off

A Seasonal Shift

I spent my lunch hour today doing "the big change," collecting the winter things in their boxes and putting back the autumn decor that is usually up, plus the seasonal spring decorations. This did not take as long as I expected, thankfully, so I could finish today; it was just a busy hour of packing and running up and down the stairs—a great workout. There are only one large container and two smaller containers of winter things, plus a Hallmark bag with the two "snow baskets," the winter bouquet, and the pine cone garland. The spring decorations are even less: two "sweater boxes." The vase of cattails and Chinese lanterns is back on the hearth, the pretty "friends" plaque and the Country Pickins shadowbox back up in the dining room, and my cute little lamb figurine that I bought at Hobby Lobby now sits smiling in front of a bouquet of spring flowers on the table.

I was kicked into action to do this by realizing yesterday that it was a week to St. Joseph's Day and I still didn't have my St. Joseph's altar up yet! This is on the china cabinet and replaced my winter village.

I had the things on the porch down over a week ago, disgusted by our warm weather, having taken them down in a fit of pique, but they were still lying in a depressing heap in the foyer. So they're all away, and James will put the boxes up some day this week, and that will be that.

Now if I could just get all the Christmas presents off the hearth...

Eighty degrees for the rest of the week! Aieeeeee!