Easter

When I was growing up in Milwaukee in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the Christian holidays were honored culturally. We sang Christmas Carols during December at school. We had the week following Easter off – always – as spring break – whether or not the weather honored the season. And although my family were not church-going people, we celebrated the Christian festivals along with everyone else.

For weeks before Holy Week, Mom carefully decorated pysanky, the Ukrainian decorated Easter eggs. I had the job of blowing out the eggs before Mom sat at the kitchen table and carefully applied wax and coloring to the empty shells.

I was still small – maybe 6 or 7 – when Mom told me that a man had been hung on a cross to die. The streets were quiet that Good Friday – stores were closed to honor the somber day – when she let me go out to play on the front steps of the flat on Ring Street, alone. I ran up and down the steps. My instructions were to stay in front of house. And as I played alone on the steps, I wondered about that man who had been left on a cross to die. I thought he was somewhere not far away, but out of my hearing, in the quiet city.

Part of me was taken with the story, which in later years I would tell, again and again, to congregations in California, a long way from those narrow, bleak streets. I imagined the man into existence, in a way: captivated, wondering.

On Easter Day, Grandma Markowski would be making her way up the alley to our house, and we’d try to tap each other’s eggs colorful eggs – not pysanky, but regular decorated, hard-boiled eggs – to see whose egg didn’t break. They were the winner!

Later, Auntie Anne and Uncle Harvey, Mark, Patty, and Johnny would arrive for the dinner, ham and all the trimmings. Later still, the women would go into the kitchen to talk and talk as they washed and dried the dishes, while the men sat together in the living room, drinking beer, and waiting for the holiday table to be cleared so that the Sheepshead playing could begin.

Soon enough, Easter was over, and soon enough, the well decorated, hollow eggs that had been carefully decorated and displayed, were set aside, to come out another year. This year, like all the rest, a dish of the beautifully decorated eggs will grace my table, just as they did Mom’s table.

Pysanki by Mary Bahlert (Mom), Jeff Kunkel, Ronn Lass