I am sharing this today, April 10, 2023. I wrote this in 2011, before cancer, before a lot of things. This is Holy Week, and Passover, and spring. It matters.

GirasoleAzzurra/The LadyHawk

23 April 2011 @ 06:51 pm Sacred spring

Tomorrow my family will gather for Easter Sunday dinner. We are a ragtag and mostly secular bunch, but we are a family, and we take the celebration of Springtime/Passover/Easter/April seriously, which means with food. Lots of food.

I am making my mother’s Italian Wedding Soup, mostly as she did. I loved it as a child, and still do, although it is a lot of work and a lot of the family do not much like it. But I had made the broth several weeks ago and as I stood today chopping escarole and making, with assistance, many tiny little meatballs, I wondered why I was doing it. I am also making a six-hour roast lamb, and various other dishes, and even thinking about using the good china, which has been languishing lo these many years, mostly because I don’t bother to take it out.

So I ask myself again, why am I doing this? We cook all the time, and do it well. We will not be going to church, although I have followed the progression of Holy Week, almost in spite of myself, via music and thought.

Many of my friends and eating matzoh and haroset, jelly beans and peeps. There is a Persian springtime festival – Nowruz – I just learned about.

I strenuously object to the kind of living that finds every day the same. Always work, always play, always obligation, always – well, anything. People need celebration, and they need times to plan around it. They need times that are different from the usual way of things.

I think that is why I do this. I need to insist to my family that this isn’t just another Sunday. We need to mark the change of the season, the budding of the leaf, the appearance of Too Many Kinds of Chocolate. We need to do it in a sacred way. Sacred, holy, for me, always involves cooking.