Easter

As today is the most important religious festival or day in the Christian calendar, I feel that I should probably address a bit of the blog to Easter.

Easter is primarily about that giant chocolate rabbit that you get in the morning before church. Because when you first see him, and open that daunting package, you think that you're going to eat him right then and there. However, as time goes by, and you've taken some solid nibbles from his ears, and your teeth marks are clearly visible, you realize that this chocolate Easter bunny is going to get the best of you. And you come to regard his beady chocolate eyes as taunting, and so you bite off both of his ears, even though it makes your stomach hurt. The next day you take off his paws, but the eyes remain taunting. By the time you've made your way through his torso you sort of regret that someone ever figured out how to make milk chocolate into a bunny sized shape, but you persist. Soon, you've finished that giant chocolate rabbit who has been shaming you all week, but you know that he'll be resurrected the next year, sitting calmly in that same plastic box, waiting to be killed and then to rise again.

I can't say the same for the annuals that I planted yesterday. The pansies appear to have already succumbed to the heat, and resemble nothing so much as one of those poor toons after they'd been steam rolled in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," which is to say, wilted, dead. Strangely, as I begin to embark on my own first round of gardening the minister of our church began his sermon today by reading from E.B. White's introduction to his late wife's book Onward and Upward in the Garden. E.B. White wrote one of the greatest children's books ever, "Charlotte's Web," but I found myself deeply moved by this introduction, and thankful to be a part of a community of believers. It also makes you realize how much effort their is in composing a wonderful essay when compared to a brief blog about Easter bunnies.

Planning the Resurrection.


– From E.B. White’s introduction of his late wife’s essays entitled
Onward and Upward in the Garden.

The only moment in the year when she actually got herself up for gardening was on the day in fall that she had selected, in advance, for the laying out of the spring bulb garden. The morning often turned out to be raw and overcast, with a searching wind off the water — an easterly that finds its way quickly to your bones.

Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katharine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a little round wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair — a folding canvas thing — that had been placed for her at the edge of the plot. There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while Henry Allen produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for the intricate interment. As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion — the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.


And that, my friends, is writing.


I was going to use this space to put a painting for of the Resurrection, but I found myself at odds with the depictions. The hard-headed and modern thinker in me just kept thinking of writing something about wanting to have washboard abs like the risen Christ. Which is to say, while the glory depicted is accurate, the rendering seems off. The women thought at first that his body had been taken in the night. They did not immediately assume a Resurrection had taken place.

Either way though, today is a day for celebration for those of the Christian faith. Today is the day that you feel at your very core that this worship is a good thing. It has given you hope that this life is not all. I consider that a blessed thing.
He is risen.

I'm going to walk out on the porch in the evening, and watch the light die. I'm going to rock in an old white chair, and dream of what it might be like to age. The flowers are lying half-heartedly in the shallow clay, waiting for water, waiting for the hand of a gardener to bring water, to bring life.