Two Deviled Eggs and the Remembrance of Things Past

 At the beginning of The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot writes, “April is the cruelest month,” and I think about that line each spring.  One warm day is followed by too many days of chilly gray rain, but still, the bleeding heart bush pushes up, determined, each day a little greener, and yesterday, I saw the string of heart buds, each no bigger than pearls, bending in a rosy strand from the stem. On Friday, I bought a few baskets of pansies—no garden this year because we will be gone by the third week of June, but there must be pansies.  It was in April, a number of years ago, that Naomi Shihab Nye visited Laurel School and, unbeknownst to her, inspired me to write again, to be a writer.  So, for me, April is not particularly cruel, but it is often a month of paradox and wonder.

This month, I was excited to introduce the 9th graders to Elizabethan sonnets.  Years ago, in Italy, inspired by the religious art surrounding us on a trip to Italy, I bought lots of different postcards of the Madonna and child—there was Mary, swathed in red and blue robes, holding the Baby Jesus—termed by Miranda as a toddler as Baby Cheese Whiz, a malapropism we cherished.  The subject was always the same, mandated by whoever it was who gave the orders about sacred art—my sense is that subject matter was tightly prescribed during the Renaissance. But it was the variations in the paintings that interested me—Mary’s expression, the baby looking more like a little old man than an infant, the backgrounds, the details . So, whenever I teach sonnets, I start by laying out my Madonna postcard collection and ask the girls to comment on form, content and interpretation.

Hoping to inspire their creativity, I told them about life under Elizabeth I. I explained how the Elizabethans prized wit and how iambic pentameter follows the natural meter of English. I talked about how the pronoucniation of words has shifted over time—how wound and sound used to rhyme. I explained Shakepeare’s efforts to help the Earl of Southampton be more successful at court, told them of their deep friendship, of Shakepeare’s unrequited love for the Dark Lady, of Shakespeare’s passion and sorrow. But my exuberance did not charm seem to them.  I was conscious that this might be the very last time I teach girls about sonnets.

“This is hard,” they muttered, turning over the paper plate I had laid on each desk to discover the first line of a sonnet I asked them to complete during class. They grimaced, counting syllables on their fingers, wrestling with iambic pentameter, and asking, from time to time, what word might rhyme with moon or promise.  My requests for more figurative language, more multi-syllabic words, more passion were largely ignored.  Watching them, heads bowed, I thought about other Aprils when I taught poetry—my Chapin girls in the tenth grade doing a dash through British poetry each spring—from Chaucer to Eliot. I thought about unlocking poetry myself as a student at Agnes Irwin, how I loved figuring out the conceit or the imagery. I remembered our ETC kids unlocking the emotion of a sonnet in my acting class in the Community Hall or in the oregano field down the fire escape, full of clover and bees. My first beau gave me a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets long ago as he ended our relationship; I wept as I mourned, too young to know much about love, but certain that my heart was breaking.  It was not April, but April brings reminds me of the hugeness of my feelings.  I know my students have big feelings, but the sonnets aren’t doing it for them.  I remember myself as a jilred girlfriend,  weeping over the beautiful language, wondering if anyone would ever love me?

“Never read these during a break up,” I cautioned my ninth graders.  They nodded, dubious.  I suspect they are thinking, “Why would we?”

I could not know at seventeen how rich in love my life would be. Last night, at about 11:30 p.m., my younger daughter used the Find my I-Phone app to wake me to tell me our son wasn’t feeling well; we merged him into our call. I counseled Tylenol and fluids, and his fever lessened, and we all went back to sleep. This morning, I considered how lucky I am to have an intricate web of relationships in my life. No Easter baskets this year, no egg hunts, no chocolate bunnies or fancy lunches. But awe and gratitude are sufficient.  I am awed by my children and my husband and my friends whose capacity to love me seems boundless. I am awed by what it has meant to love the school I lead—the children, of course, but the faculty and staff, too; the alums, former faculty and staff, parents, colleagues. I know that I am love

This Easter morning, the sky is bright and blue. From my chair, I can look out the the leaden panes and I spy the corner of our across-the-street neighbors’ house—red brick. Often, their children play in their front yard, their laughter floating through our window. Last Saturday, they invited us to join them for their Seder.  I see our lilac bush, just beginning to leaf, and beyond that, a magnolia tree, its magenta blossoms heavy. Spring’s progress is inexorable—it cannot be stopped, even if we want to slow down time.  And I realize inexorable is the adjective that has eluded me these past weeks. We cannot stop or slow down time. Holidays like Easter arrive, bringing with them Shakespeare’s (and Proust’s) “remembrance of things past” from Sonnet 30.

 For this endless process of sorting, tossing, saving, packing cannot help but awake memories.  Perhaps this is my first Easter alone. I contemplated going to a Sunrise Service, considered slipping into a pew at St. Paul’s, but here I am, instead, thinking about Easters’ past—the Easter lunch Meg and I made in my apartment in Gould Hall—the carpet a foul bilious green. I recall fancy formal family Easter lunches at 848 with Grannie and PopPop on the same plates I used at last Sunday’s Seder, our final celebration in Lyman House, one difference being that I do not have a bell under my foot to discreetly summon the serving girls to carry away the dirty plates; another being that we washed the dishes ourselves, Kate and Julie and I, and Seth said, “Just leave them on the table, Ann, because I’m going to pack them,” and I did. I think about the Easter mornings when our children hunted for their baskets, Seth chiding me that I had made Easter into another excuse for giving presents!

 What will next Easter feel like?  We cannot see around corners, which, for the most part, is, in my opinion, a good thing.  But it is odd to have had the rhythm of the year prescribed by the school calendar for so long, and to be free of that come the end of June. 

 “I’m taking a gap year,” I explain when people ask, though recently I told Seth my big plan was to be a bump on a log.  When I think about the future, I expect that I will  lift Grannie’s plates—cobalt blue with a gold rim, delicate flowers dancing in the center--from their wrapping one day next fall, after Cordelia and Cole’s Montana wedding, after Seth and I sail to Europe on the Queen Mary (a lifelong dream of mine—though I am still grappling with the understanding that I will not have Kate Winslet’s wardrobe from The Titanic or a steamer trunk or fancy hats or a ladies’ maid—it’s my hope I won’t have any icebergs either. )  I can see myself putting away the plates. But beyond the endless unpacking that I anticipate, the contours of this next chapter are harder to imagine.

And isn’t that part of today, too?  In the kitchen, I hum “Jesus Christ has risen today…alleluia!” The pets do not judge my off-key cheer.  Growing up, Easter meant pungent white lilies and a son and his father reunited.  I pictured Jesus, fully clothed—I never liked that he was largely unclothed on the cross--rising through the sky, embraced by his father, who resembled my grandfather. Easter meant hope and mystery and dying eggs with my brother and sister and new clothes for church and ankle socks and patent leather buckle shoes and jelly beans. Later, Easter meant driving with the girls from NYC to visit Mom in Rosemont and making baskets and hiding plastic eggs for our own children. Later still, Atticus’ gleeful squeals floated up from our Lyman House backyard as he discovered the eggs his sisters and dad and I had hidden, one nestled in the hyacinths, another in an empty flower pot.. Easter often meant an overlap with Passover, too, both observed in our family but without the religious lens.

 Yesterday, having my hair trimmed, I asked my stylist, Victoria, what she would do for Easter.

“I’ll make devilled eggs, two dozen,” she smiled, “and take them to lunch.”

Devilled eggs. What a good idea. It would never occur to me to make them.  But this afternoon, having re-read and discarded all the sympathy notes about my parents’ deaths 15 years ago (discovered in a drawer I had believed was empty and was, sadly, not empty at all), I boiled two eggs—a king’s ransom these days. I sliced them carefully and mixed up the yolks with mustard and a little sour cream, mayonnaise nowhere to be found.  The mixture was too runny, but the paprika helped.

I am planning to enjoy all four halves, alone, knowing I’m surrounded by memories and by love and by a future that will spool out, inexorably just like spring.

Easter. A remembrance of things past. A beginning not an ending.