It's a beautiful spring morning in QD, and Bea and I have the windows thrown open inviting in the warmth and sunshine. We've got banana muffins cooling on the counter to tuck into another suitcase (we're promised a steady diet of Chinese food on our tour, and since the only Chinese food Eliza likes is rice, I thought we'd supplement the diet of our svelte seven-year old! We did have a slight break through this morning... her six slim Levis where officially too snug, but my excitement wained when I realized the H&M skinny jeans she slipped into instead on her first ever sanctioned non-uniform day were size 4-5... you read that correctly size 4-5!)
Mr. Johnson will soon be home to change his clothes and in all reality be the one who checks for passports. In anticipation of his noontime arrival, I was peeling our recently dyed eggs to make egg salad for his lunch. Mr. Johnson has a strong affinity for egg salad sandwiches, which are a whimsical reminder of his boyhood on the farm... egg salad sandwiches on Wonder bread were a staple summer food, along with a cold Coke after a morning of baling hay. I did not use to share this affinity. In fact, it still sort of conjours in my mind the scene from Napoleon Dynamite when he spends the morning working on a chicken farm. Never-the-less, at least once a year I do make up a bowl of egg salad, usually brightly tinged from the residual dyes that have seeped through the shell during the dying process. With generous amounts of curry powder, and crushed black pepper (or "pepper black broken" as the English portion of the Chinese label reads.) I am finding a new if only annual affection for egg salad.
One of the eggs I peeled was Eliza's. She had carefully, in best first grade penmanship, printed the names Jesus and God on her egg, and then had drawn a crooked cross on the sloping dome of the egg. It was a sweet reminder, and in reality what prompted me back to the computer. We are quick to remember the commercial side of this holiday. Still is it was a poignant reminder of the truth of this holiday season. God + Jesus + the Cross = Easter. It doesn't get much more simple than that.
We're headed to a series of caves this weekend. And while we're there, we'll remember another cave-like tomb, now empty... Happy Easter!
“There is a stage in a child’s life at which it cannot separate the religious from the merely festal character of Christmas or Easter. I have been told of a very small and very devout boy who was heard murmuring to himself on Easter morning a poem of his own composition which began ‘Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen.’ This seems to me, for his age, both admirable poetry and admirable piety. But of course the time will soon come when such a child can no longer effortlessly and spontaneously enjoy that unity. He will become able to distinguish the spiritual from the ritual and festal aspect of Easter; chocolate eggs will no longer seem sacramental. And once he has distinguished he must put one or the other first. If he puts the spiritual first he can still taste something of Easter in the chocolate eggs; if he puts the eggs first they will soon be no more than any other sweetmeat. They will have taken on an independent, and therefore a soon withering, life.” ~C. S. Lewis
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