Resurrection: Take It Slow

Our week off from school started with a fabulous Passover Seder and ended with a glorious Easter Egg Hunt, but we have to admit we'd be feeling decidedly more Liberated and possibly even Resurrected if it weren't still forty degrees out there, with rain spitting sideways most of the time. This might explain why, even though we remembered (miraculously) to pick up a PAAS kit at the Safeway on Wednesday, and also managed (somehow) to acquire and boil three dozen eggs on Saturday, we still woke up Sunday morning without actually having dyed a single one of them. With 40 minutes to go before the Easter Egg Hunt at Seward Park, we sprang into action, assembling cups, spoons, vinegar, dye pellets, and crayons on the kitchen counter before summoning the children.

As they doodled and dipped and dribbled and dripped, we found ourselves somewhat sobered by the tragic fragility of this classic springtime symbol. Between the two that broke in the carton on the way home from the store, the three that cracked as we plopped them into the pot, and the four others whose invisible weak spots were unfortunately amplified by exposure to boiling water, our attrition rate rivaled that of Seattle's high schools. At least our ovate casualties made a good breakfast: not the proverbial omelet, perhaps, but mighty tasty with a little salt on toast.

Steve and Hillary's annual Easter Egg Hunt (like the Stitzhals's Seder) is a collective action. Everybody arrives with a bunch of eggs -- plastic, chocolate, or dyed. And then, after the eggs have all been hidden by some people and found by other (generally shorter) people, everybody goes home with a bunch of eggs -- minus most of the candy ones. As Simon piled eleven colored eggs into his basket, we watched them knocking dangerously together and thought of that other, less sanguine egg proverb. How many of these eggs, we wondered, would make it intact down the hill to Seward Park? How many would be forgotten in the tall grass at the edge of the meadow, or stepped on by overeager two-year-olds in frog-faced rubber boots? How many would be carried off by other kids and wind up as blue-tinged egg salad sandwiches in households across the city? And how many would come back home, muddy but unbroken, in Simon's basket?

None of those eggs came home again, as it turned out. When we arrived at the park, a cold wind had chased many of the guests under the picnic shelter, where they huddled around Steve's blazing fire -- but for the first time in many Easters, it wasn't actually raining. Dave had brought a space shuttle kite along -- a beautiful flyer with a spinning red spiral tail -- and Simon immediately lost all interest in the ham, the hot cross buns, the donuts, the cocoa, and the Egg Hunt. Even the Easter Bunny himself, who hopped out of a passing station wagon to entertain the crowd, failed to distract our boy from the shuttle kite for long.

And so, when two dozen children were released into the field carrying their empty baskets,  shopping bags, orange plastic pumpkins -- even, in one case, a large gold lamé purse -- Simon was not among them. Instead, he and I were engaged in our own little game of hide and seek, wherein I would put my cup of coffee down so I could grab the string with both hands and yank the kite away from the cedar tree across the field, or frantically reel in the line so our ankles wouldn't get tangled in the slack... and then when the shuttle's flight pattern had been temporarily stabilized, I'd have to go back through the tall grass looking for the silver glint of my travel mug among the colored eggs and excited children scattered throughout the meadow.

I'm not sure many kites could have survived such crazy, gusty, gale-force winds without coming apart at the seams; but this one was designed for orbit, after all. Nevertheless it took constant attention and nonstop adjustment -- running, reeling, releasing -- just to keep it airborne... And a certain amount of shouting and praying to keep it from spinning into the arms of a tree, or nosediving into the sodden field, or swooping so low that its whipping string threatened to mow down whole families of egg-seekers.

Once or twice it did plummet straight to the ground, hitting bottom with a sickening squelch. One of us would run out to wipe the mud off the nose and untangle the spinning red tail... and then hold the straining creature up by both wings and jump up high, flinging it skyward. And up it would leap, skittering and stalling, zig-zagging and loop-de-looping, and finally, fleetingly -- soaring. It was the closest thing to Resurrection I had encountered in quite a while.

Until I went for a walk that afternoon and came across this tree:

Or rather, this bravely regenerating stump. It's no thing of beauty, I'll admit. But I found it reassuring, this humble reminder that as long as your roots are strong and deep, you can be hacked at, driven over, completely chopped down -- and still rise up new.

You may end up a little twisted by the process. It'll be a slower climb than the kite's reckless, exhilarating ascent: it took several seasons of sun and rain and patience for this little tree to make it even this far. This is no Ascension -- you're still stuck here on Earth, knee-deep in the cold mud, with nothing but a yellow bollard between you and the next wayward garbage truck. But you're standing firm on your own, not riding all jittery on the gusty wind. You're growing and stretching, offering your leaves and flowers to the sky above. And you don't have to worry about the next gust of wind sending you into a tailspin.