Why Easter Means More Than Chocolate Bunnies

           Easter’s origins are sacred to those whose practice Christianity.  The holiday is sacred to me for wholly different reasons.  As a young child, Easter promised a litany of traditions that were strictly observed in our family:  a new dress, a new slip, white gloves, bobby socks, and shiny new

patent-leather shoes.  The most cherished addition to the Easter outfit was a “bonnet”; I was often able to choose a pert new hat to set off my dress.  There were Easter baskets filled with small gifts and chocolate bunnies that

helped the hour or so before church pass quickly.  Holding my mother’s hand, I loved stepping into the nave of the church buffeted by the triumphant musical offerings that heralded the Good News. Easter Sundays forced the minister to truncate his sermon in order to make room for the choir director’s choral arrangements. In my Protestant church, timeliness was never violated; the notion of running more than the prescribed hour for a service was anathema to the congregation.  Contrary to other Sunday services, I did not doze or scribble or play mindless games such as counting the number of bricks in the ceiling.  Instead, on Easters, I nibbled every so slowly on the one, foil-wrapped chocolate bunny I was allowed to tuck into my little purse along side my white hankie bearing the letter “D and a quarter for the offertory plate.

         When I was twelve, my knees frequently dislocated when I walked.  A renowned orthopedic surgeon in New Jersey advised us that I needed to have my knees repaired as soon as possible; beside the painful nature of this problem, I was doing irreparable damage to the cartilage. We would start with the right knee during Easter vacation.  In addition, I would miss another week or ten days of school.  Three to six months later, he would repair the left knee. 

My surgeon’s schedule dictated I arrive at the hospital the day before the surgery. I underwent lots of blood work and x-rays and a thorough scrubbing before being wheeled down to the operating room at 6a.m. the next morning.  The post-surgical week was filled with pain, glimpses of my parents and sister, morphine delirium and friendly bunnies hopping off the walls.  By Easter morning, my doctor deemed me fit for a daytime-leave from the hospital.  I was to be back in my hospital bed by 6 p.m..  Our traditions for the day were put aside to accommodate my condition.  For example, for my Easter outfit, my mother delighted me by making me a pair of flowing palazzo pants in a psychedelic pink fabric that I had admired.  The pants fit easily over my thigh to ankle cast. My flip-flops were the only shoes that fit my swollen foot. Our family had dinner in a dark, crowded restaurant.  Its wooden dance floor still haunts me as I remember crutching back from the Ladies Room and taking a clumsy spill on the somewhat forgiving surface. Fortunately, I more bounced than fell.  I was publicly mortified when my father scooped me up and placed back in my wheelchair.  However, those splendid palazzo pants gave me the confidence to be wheeled back to the car under the curious eyes of the other restaurant guests.

     I turned very quiet on the car ride back to the hospital.  I was faced with another painful week of physical therapy.   My mind was desperately trying to reconcile the meaning of Easter with the idea of spiritual resurrection and with the daunting tasks ahead.  I was faced with having to recuperate from the right knee surgery then return to repeat the entire process on my left knee. I remember the thrill when I had first had a glimmer of an insight; the only way through these challenges was going to be with the help of my family, my friends, and my faith.   

        

         Easter was all about the impossible. Easter that year had not included most of our traditional observances.  We didn’t attend church or enjoy the familiar music that always lifted my spirits.  The flowers, oh the flowers – lily’s and hyacinths and tulips and daffodils – all so integral in proclaiming Easter—were not in sight.  There was no Easter egg hunt.    However, a cataclysmic shift took place in my understanding of Easter.  The resurrection of hope could not be confined to one oft-told tale of of a young man’s sojourn to death and back again.  For me, Easter had come to have an enormous significance for anyone who believed in the possibility of new beginnings. Anyone who wished to could lay down the burden of their past and, instead, pick up the promise of the future. 

        

         In the last gasp of pre-teen awareness, I understood that Easter was not about the new hat, the new dress or the chocolate Easter bunny.  Easter was about the crocuses pushing their way up through the cool, dark soil to bring a spot of color to a spring day.  Easter was about the sunrise when the fingers of first light promised the dawn of a new day. 

          In the forty years since that Easter, nothing has diminished my belief that Easter serves to remind us that hope is a certainty; it is among God’s greatest gifts to mankind.   Darkened skies and  defeated spirits can not withstand the restorative power of hope….Hope, buoyed by love and a positive attitude,  always brings with it a better, brighter tomorrow.  

Charles Frank Film

This is a link to Charles Frank's trailer for a short he is entering in a film contest in Easthampton, MA.

http://www.youtube.com/user/charlesfrankfilm

While there, check out his film called, "Tag."  He won a prize for it last year.  This is a proud mother.

Chestnut Mountain View

            Years ago, the cover of a newsstand magazine caught my attention.  Headlined in the August edition was the 1996 Better Homes and Gardens Home of the Year.  Ever since then, I have kept that magazine preserved in a manila envelope covered with large bold words in red ink; SAVE, SAVE, SAVE.  The plans in that magazine changed my life.

            Back in August, 1996, my husband, three children, two cats and one bird were pushing out the boundaries of our 2200sq. foot restored farmhouse.  We were at a cross-road; we needed to expand our living quarters, build or purchase a new home.  The plans in Better Homes and Gardens captivated our attention and claimed out hearts.  I mailed a check for the architectural plans and we allowed our dreams to blossom.  We searched six months for an appropriate lot that would meet our budget and construction requirements.  Our efforts were not fruitful.  Reluctantly, we shelved our desire to build the 1996 Better Homes and Gardens Home of the Year.  We put our one hundred year old home on stilts, dug a full basement, constructed a solid foundation and added a family room and a library.  We loved the property we rebuilt.  We had a comfortable home, an in-ground pool and over a acre of land for privacy. And yet…

            From a box, under our bed, in an envelope labeled SAVE, SAVE, SAVE our future whispered to us.  By tacit, unspoken agreement, we kept a six-year vigil for the hillside property that might accommodate our house.  My husband stumbled upon it in a casual conversation with an insurance client.  The property had proven difficult to develop and he wanted to sell it.             

            Together, my husband and I hiked up the remnants of a logging road that disappeared into an overgrown tangle of thicket .  After climbing 400 feet up Chestnut Mountain, we took to trails left by deer and other fauna of western Massachusetts.  My husband gained purchase of the view by shimmying up a tree.  I climbed on until I reached a rock-roped ridge with a stream of water trickling down it.  My heart beat loud and fast, whether from exhilaration or exertion, I was not concerned.  I had a strong, sure sense of coming home.  Unfolding below us was the wide, expansive vista of the rolling hills and mountains that lend the geographic identity to this region.  The Connecticut River Valley coursed through it, threading its way south toward Springfield, toward the sea. 

            The land purchase was readily accomplished.  What followed was anything but easy.  We endured a two-year legal wrangle with the local Zoning Board who were invested in flexing their muscles on our project.  Less committed dreamers may have abandoned their dreams, but we had a secret inspiration.  We had a magazine with a full photo-shoot of our dream house as it would rise from the end of a 1200 foot long mountainous driveway.  

            We moved in December, 2005.  Numerous projects are still underway, including:  landscaping, constructing the wrap-around porch, finishing the first floor space.  Time, energy and resources have been at a premium.  These facts in no way diminish our deep sense of gratitude that we live on ten acres in a home that can only be described as a hallowed place: we live perched between earth and sky in a spacious and light-filled home once featured in Better Homes and Gardens.

 March 2010

An Homage to Emily; When love comes to call.

When love comes to call, it sends no couriers.

It oft arrives without preamble, forewarning or thought.

It becomes incarnate in its hosts for time without measure.

Its duration, the eternity stored between the rollicking beats of two

Loving hearts.

When love lays its claim,

It rushes to secure its newly gained ground –

Its geography and landscape ripe with new promise.

It basks in the rich pleasure of each stolen moment

Converting the vanquished to victor anew.

When love loses luster

Habit and pattern oft times linger as glue.

The dizzying pulse of new love untethered

As events, sometimes capricious, pry lovers

Apart.  Love’s glossy coat may be worn and tattered

But steady the metronome of two beating hearts.

When love, resurrected, endures decades

Embattled, its old magic echoes in harmonic

Refrain.
The half-lift of a brow, the brush of a palm, a ghost

Of a smile, a language its own. 

When love comes to call, it lingers a lifetime until,

At last, its labored breath exhales as one.

d.evans    April 8, 2011

The Untold Story

There are three dates of supreme significance in my daughter’s life. Hannah was conceived on 25 July, 1989. She was delivered on 4 May, 1990. We celebrate the role that medical technology and surgical finesse played in her rebirth on 17 March, 2005. When it comes to Hannah, there is much to celebrate. When it comes to Hannah, so much has been joyous, but nothing has been easy.
Hannah did not take that first instinctual gasp of air when she was born. The drama took place in that instant of what didn’t happen. It took the efforts of a pediatrician and several nurses to coax her to breathe. She was a nine-pound baby whose lungs were filled with melconium. By the time Hannah was seven, we knew that something was not altogether right about her breathing. Our active, bright child was petite – she did even make the height and weight percentiles on the growth curves in every pediatrician’s office; her place in the front row, center, of every class picture was assured. Despite her size, she was reading by three, calculating volumes of spheres by the time she was five. Hannah had exceptional strength, coordination and flexibility. She was recruited to compete on an elite gymnastic team when she was seven. But the simple act of breathing challenged Hannah. She struggled with asthma, chronic respiratory infections and recurrent pneumonia.
Summers were the best for her. Winters stopped her in her tracks. She rarely complained about the cancelled plans, abandoned vacations and interrupted efforts on performances and competitions. Over time, Hannah developed allergies to all antibiotics. In order to take an antibiotic, she first has to go through a desensitization process under the care of an immunologist in Boston. Rather than bemoan her circumstances, she channeled her energy into academics and pushed herself to the limit. In high school, we discovered she had needlessly suffered for years due to a misdiagnosis of a congenital lung abnormality. By the time it was detected, her condition had deteriorated into a life-threatening situation. After a radical lung reconstruction and ensuing drug therapy for aspergillus, Hannah reclaimed her life. It took a year for Hannah to fully recover from her surgery and treatment. She did more than simply recover. She pushed beyond the physical limits she had always known. The young woman she has become is filled with grace.
Sometimes a story is told in terms of what we can’t see. In Hannah’s transcripts, we can’t see how self-directed much of her education has been. We can’t see the times she was overlooked and forgotten socially because she was unable to attend school. We can’t see her unique ability to make lemonade out of lemons – in three languages! On my bureau rests an empty picture frame; it is surrounded by photographs of my three children, a favorite quote and a picture of my husband. I keep the small glass frame empty for one reason. It holds all the possibility of a thousand untold stories. Hannah is like that empty frame. She rarely looks back at what might have been. Rather, her eyes are fixed on the future and focused on all the bright magic of the stories she will tell.

September, 2008


I wrote this essay to attach as the parents’ statement on Hannah’s application to Georgetown University. Fast forward three years – Hannah is a junior at Georgetown. I could never have guessed that Hannah would have to take a medical leave of absence in spring of her junior year. Her lungs, once again, have raised havoc with her plans. She intended to spend four months studying in Tokyo. Hannah withdrew less than a week before the recent devastating earthquake hit Japan. My departed mother would have offered her wry wisdom, sotto voce, “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

Hannah at 7

March, 2011

Prayer Works

I have every reason to believe in prayer. My first prayers were memorized and recited by rote; they were part of the ritual of mealtime, bedtime and church. The prayers were not my own, but I laid claim to them. “Now I lay me down to sleep. The Lord is good, the Lord is great. Our Father who art in heaven.” I recited these words with the confidence that only a child has that God is listening. Prayer continued to be an integral part of my life as I entered middle school. Growing up, my mother’s younger sister lived with us. She was twelve years older than me and twelve years younger than my mother. My aunt tells the story of how she found me, on the day of her departure to her own apartment, kneeling, bible in hand, before a lighted candle. The thing is, I can remember just how I felt. How I was imploring God to look after this person I loved even if she did have to leave me. I wanted to pray that she would stay, but I knew, even then, that such a selfish request would go unheeded. Just about the same time, I changed schools. I met a whole new world of friends. On our walks to school and home again, we would talk about our teachers, school lunches and whether God existed. I listened, with interest, to a boy – a self-declared agnostic – explain his doubts whether God existed. I made the mistake of asking a devout Catholic boy how he had such utter certainty that God was real. I wasn’t intending to challenge him;I really wanted to know. I paid for that question with a fist to my solar plexus. I went down like a rock. I didn’t have theological debates with that crew again.
Over the interceding forty years, life has presented ample opportunities for me to pray. Driven by circumstance, I have turned to prayer over and over again. The numbers are impressive. A serious car accident, five miscarriages, one Alzheimer afflicted father-in-law in-residence, my husband’s resignation from his job on the day my first viable pregnancy was confirmed, a placenta previa, six months on bed-rest while caring for my one-year old baby. There were the many pneumonias and respiratory infections that plagued my first-born. There was the debilitating illness that wracked my second child for a year before her grossly inflamed appendix was removed. I fought the inexplicable degeneration of my joints that led to chronic pain and surgical repairs and my son’s struggle with demons we didn’t always understand. I used prayer through my eldest child’s lung surgery and battle with the fungi aspergillus and, my second child’s struggle with Ehler’s-Danlos Syndrome alongside the discovery that she had inherited this pernicious disorder from me. I prayed as I stood alongside my mother from cancer’s grasp to its defeat of her. Prayer has been a constant through the years of what my parents once tagged as my “many trials of Job.” My prayers were always answered. I simply did not always recognize the answers that were delivered for what they were.

Each decade has brought with it its own formula for successful prayer; how I pray, the exact mechanics of what prayer is, has changed with time. When I was a child, I would pray to God by calling out his name, then politely making a request. I prayed aloud for understanding and help. It seemed that I was successful using this approach; I began to think that this was a lot like a magic act I’d seen at a church fundraiser. A magician was hired to say the magic words, repeat our heart’s desires and AbracadabraShazaam, a rabbit, peanut butter sandwich or scarf appeared!! It was imperative that we limit our heart’s desires to items displayed directly on the table in front of us. I believed that I should never pray for something I couldn’t imagine.

High school brought its own set of worries and concerns. I noticed that when I turned to the same God I had prayed to in elementary school, I got similar results….despite the odds, things turned out for the best. . “God, please let the boy in eighth grade math notice me despite my leg braces and crutches.” He called that week. However, it was easy to read on the faces of the cool kids that it wasn’t cool to pray in public and definitely not in school. I decided to go underground with my prayer and call it meditation, instead. In tenth grade, I took some lessons in Transcendental Meditation (TM) and learned how to ohhmmm with the best of them. I went from being geeky to being hippie with little more than a mantra. Meanwhile, despite hardships, goodness - godliness – continued to be spill into my life.

In my twenties, my prayer methods evolved to asking for the highest good for all involved. I gave up the notion that I could know what would be the best resolution to a problem. I gave up believing I had any idea of what was on the table. I left it up to God to determine the outcome that would best serve everyone involved. I arrived at this acceptance by way of a funeral I attended for a young man who was killed in a car accident. His death left his wife and two young children disconsolate. The priest presiding over the service declared that humans have a restricted view of God’s will. He likened our knowledge of God’s intentions to a view of a parade -- seen through a knothole in a picket fence. Prayer was a way to make the view a little larger and bring us more perspective about our place in that parade.
My thirties brought a profound awareness that the best I could do was to let go and let God take over. It was a relief to know that I was never going to be cast adrift; in moments of despair, panic or loneliness, I could take a break to ask for God’s presence in my life. If I was quiet and still, God found me.
What served as a resort of last measure in my thirties was my go- to strategy as the mother of three children in my forties. I had enough sense to realize that life was too big, too complex, too much for me to tackle on my own. A little divine intervention was necessary. I decided moving meditations might be an adjunct to those long-ago thirty-minute TM sessions. I found myself asleep in five minutes when I tried long, recumbent meditative trances. (I have seen discovered that I can sleep sitting up -- an highly evolved skill, I might add.) I found a new way to pray. My mantra– heard as a buzzing in my ears-- was a short, staccato sound, repeated over and over……..GodGodGodGodGod. Though somewhat frenetic, this method kept me in touch with my greater power and it worked for me.
It was in this decade that I discovered for myself the indisputable power of sharing prayer. My cousin, Alison, always, upon hearing of my challenges would say, “I will pray for you.” I was touched that she would think of me. Finally, I was feeling so overwhelmed and full of despair that I submitted a prayer request and a ten-dollar bill to Unity Village. Within a week or so, the tremendous weight lifted from my shoulders. Cause and effect? I will never know for sure, but I do know that I drew comfort knowing my child’s life was not solely in my hands. As reluctant as I was to draw anyone else into my personal conversations with God, I discovered that when friends, family and well-wishers raised my prayers with their voices, my small, quiet voice was lifted. Whenever more than one person brings their clear intentions to inviting God’s presence in another person’s life, it is prayer. The whisper of thanks, the surrender to God, these are simple prayers of beneficence. Now. when my.sister-in-law says, “ Good-bye, I will pray for you.” I say, “Please do.”
In my fifties, I have, once again, devised a different approach to prayer that combines the magic of childhood, the quiet, stillness of my twenties, the letting go of my thirties and the prayer in motion of my forties. Prayer is more than desire; it is intention. The prayer of my fifties starts with mindfulness. I hold an awareness of that moment, letting it expand into my total consciousness. Gradually, I let thoughts and concerns drift through without latching too hard onto them. They come, they go with each breath. A refrain of GodGodGodGod taps out in a whisper at the edge of my awareness. The last part involves being aware of what follows. Expect and look for good things and they arrive. Ask for help, it comes. Sometimes in a form or in a manner I could never imagined or considered. Most often in a time frame that I find frustrating. However, with patience and time, I see order in all that transpires. I understand I am one small part of a much larger mosaic. Prayer lifts me and brings me joy even when I have lagging faith. I have learned that faith is a rugged weed and not easily exterminated. Even for an experienced gardener.

October 2010

One Week in the Pages of a Magazine

Possibilities are limitless with imagination as a guide. How else can you explain the thread that links Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown (Harper Collins, 1964), Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts (Warner Books, 1998) and The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A.J. Jacobs (Simon and Schuster, 2007)? I arrived at this commonality during a convalescence after recent surgery. During long hours of solitude, when reading was still a challenge for me, I let my mind drift through book titles I had read in the past. I did mental calesthenics – I challenged myself to list authors, settings, characters. I grouped them by topic, by publication date, by the date I first read the book. By now, it must be more than evident than I am a literary geek. Let’s simply acknowledge that fact and move on.
I started formulating a thesis that the books we read as children shape our dreams and mold our futures. Some of my favorite childhood books were T.H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, The Borrowers, and E.L.Kinigsburg’s From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I looked for adventure, a world within another world, a strong, moral protagonist and a satisfying conclusion. Every book that claimed my attention successfully drew me into its pages, lifting me out of my seat into its plot. Escape.
One of my earliest chapter books, Flat Stanley, recounts Stanley’s conundrum when a bulletin board lands on his bed, flattening him to a record four feet tall, a foot wide, and half an inch thick. At first, the novelty of his situation offers many distractions and numerous escapades. Stanley even solves an art heist. His condition eventually wears on him. His creative brother uses a bicycle pump to restore Stanley to his former stature. My daydreams allowed me to accompany Stanley on his high-flying adventures as a kite, down a sidewalk grate below the street and into the U.S. postal service. I catalogued and stored those pleasurable thoughts for future reference.
Thirty years later, I was, unconsciously seeking the same kind of thrill. Case in point, the book Where the Heart Is. This novel is almost entirely played out in a Walmart. The main character finds herself pregnant and trapped by circumstance and finances inside this giant big-box store. She shows resourcefulness and ingenuity in creating a comfortable world. Drawing from house wares, electronics, and the grocery section, she creates a comfortable environment to live in after hours. Despite all expectations to the contrary, she develops a real friendship with a man who, ultimately, changes and improves her life.
Another vault of mind and I arrive in the pages of A. J. Jacobs’s The Year of Living Biblically. I gleaned what I know about this book from a lengthy New York Times Book Review and a Barnes and Noble research expedition. A comfortable leather chair, a decaf. vanilla latte and a Sunday afternoon spent speed reading the book at Barnes and Noble. The crux of the book is that a less than religious Jewish man undertakes the challenge of observing his faith’s most cited biblical laws for a year. Much like Stanley and __LOOKUP NAME_________, the narrator lives in a world of his own making. He comes out subtly changed, but I will let him tell you about that. Suffice it to say that I was intrigued by the discipline and curiosity that inspired him to follow this path. Would I have the psychological muscle to commit to living so stringently? I completed a one-year Course in Miracles (in sixteen months). Does that serve as a predictor of probable success?
With all this hop-skip-and-jumping, I finally hit upon a thoroughly engaging idea. Last week, I was standing in the checkout aisle of Stop and Shop when it struck me. What would I do if, like Flat Stanley, I found myself compressed and flattened? With the scads of displayed magazines on my right, it was a no-brainer that I would like to enter the pages of a magazine featuring food as its theme. Trapped in an interior world with different rules, how would I do? Would I make friends, adapt, experience an epiphany of sorts? To challenge the notion, I pictured a miniaturized version of “me” hopping through the pages of Cooking Light magazine. For one week, I would eat and serve only recipes wrung from the 78 colorfully displayed recipes displayed therein. Twenty-one meals. On a mission, I visited Forbes Library to pick up a back issue of Cooking Light. I pulled out April, 2007, flipped through its pages, and began to digest my future.


MARCH 2008