Easter 2005

Christ is risen — and to everyone marking the day, a peaceful Easter.

In 2005 a classmate took me home with him, the way students do when a foreigner has nowhere to go for a holiday. His grandmother had been baking for two days. There was a basket that had been to church that morning, a cloth over it, eggs painted in patterns I did not yet know how to read, and paska with a crust I still think about.

I understood perhaps a fifth of the conversation. It did not matter at all. Nobody explained anything to me and nobody needed to: I was fed continuously and asked about my mother.

Twenty years later I know what the patterns on the eggs mean and I write about them elsewhere on this site. But the first Easter I understood nothing, and it was perfect.