Snippets from Easter weekend, and life triumphing over death.
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| Primroses, among the first to awaken from the frozen Winter earth to harken the life of the coming seasons. |
The way I had envisioned our secular Confucian Buddhist family's Easter/Passover/Ramadan weekend would have featured a Sunday morning highlight of recreating the idyllic egg dyeing ritual from childhood - for our Christian friends, followed by a late lunch (after a morning fast - for our Muslim friends) first meal that would include matzo ball soup (for our Jewish friends) and jammy eggs - you know, a multi culti nod to all those folks who had religious observances that gave us non- celebrants an occasion, and a long weekend, to gather as a family. That wasn't how it turned out.
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| Our actual Easter Sunday lunch - reheated pizza (more on that below), sauteed green beans (from the on the cusp remnants of Sissy's produce drawer, I believe), and frozen mussels that had languished in a freezer for years waiting to be tried. So, keeping with the theme of the holy days weekend, all of the food was "resurrected," in one manner or another. |
Instead, somehow that vision morphed into opening the weekend by going to visit Ong Noi's (paternal grandfather's) grave for ritual family "tomb sweeping," ...
...because the Qingming Festival day fell within a week of the Big Three Holidays. And since we were in our old neighborhood, that became a mission to have Alba's pizza (as good as we remembered from childhood)...
... at the cemetery, among the graves - because where else would we find easier parking? Admittedly, this sacrilege was my brainchild.
The rest of the weekend involved moving and rearranging furniture across our various separate households, sprucing up Lil' Bro's space AND the Mothership guestroom ahead of upcoming May visitors, and in the process, extracting an ancient, and really freaking heavy, bulky, awkward boob tube TV - with ratchet straps, sliding it slowly down carpeted stairs, around furniture and structural obstacles, placing total faith and complete reliance in the durability of the straps and the strength of my and Sissy's puny arms to prevent the accidental infliction of death-by-runaway-TV upon the unlucky bottom-of-the-stairs position taken up by comparatively big and strong Lil' Bro 😬😁.
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| This, and its sibling plants in the remaining photos, blooming in the Mother Garden. |
And all of this culminated at 1 am, before the start of the Easter Monday (unobserved) work day, which was, coincidentally, also fittingly, national Siblings Day! Who better to be ensnared with in all these whackadoodle schemes than my two other musketeers. We are the driving force, now, in getting things done at the Mothership, the next generation orchestrating a slow takeover, and thank goodness for having partners in crime - to share the load, and the joy.
[Finally completed August 26, 2023.]
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