On Great and Holy Saturday I pull sneakers over heavy socks and trudge around the back yard, seeking flowers. Clouds sag above the fence like loose tent walls. Petals from the neighbors’ Gravenstein tarry amid clumping edge grass I have failed to trim. The elder tree towers, boughs outstretched.
Tonight we would be resting before getting dressed up and leaving at 10:30 to pick up the friend we bring along to church every Pascha, to enter with light step and laughter and many friends, bright candles, fragrant bouquets and incense. We will not do that this year.
Our friend who would be riding to church with us is 95. She still lives at home. “I’m tired,” she said yesterday on the phone. “But I finished cleaning my dining room, top to bottom, before Pascha!”
Gripping hefty kitchen scissors I wrest free two limber apple branches. They were curved, blossoming, beneath our long-dormant satellite dish. The tree beyond the fence was last pruned before our kids left home. Long-unpruned grapevine branches surge upward from our dish to embrace its lofty boughs. These entwine in wild abandon, in social communion, with leafing kiwi vines from our clothesline. I leave the triune devotees to their privilege.
Grandma’s cut crystal vase accepts my meager arrangement: apple boughs, a crimson tulip mostly blown, sweet yellow mustard blooms, lilting, acrid ends of flowering currant. Water in the crystal sparkles. I have spread my mother-in-law’s white tablecloth in the dining room, and the vase makes the centerpiece. I have not cleaned our space from top to bottom, but still it looks nice.
The heavy clouds release a torrent, darkening the deck for the first time in a couple weeks. Letting the cat onto the front porch, I linger a moment. The aroma is healing. Like Jesus’s tears. Like repentance.
Later, Tim and I adorn ourselves in our best clothes. We set up a music stand and arrange service books purchased over time from our church bookstore, including a horologion (book of liturgical hours) and music for matins (where verses, canticles, and odes intertwine).
Tim lights candles and hanging lampadas, then swings a fragrant, smoking censer throughout our rooms. It smells like church, even here.
I miss our elderly friend, her vociferous “Khristos Voskrese!” (Russian for “Christ is Risen!”) as we drove her home after Pascha at church other years around 3:00 a.m.
The Russian revolution made her parents decide to leave everything and flee to China, where she was born. As a young adult, she fled the Communists alone, the last of her family to escape from Shanghai to Hong Kong and then Australia. She has recounted the story to us: her fear, standing on deck as the Chinese shore receded, knowing even now she could be stopped by officials and returned to a solitary life the new government would choose.
I imagine the soft lap of water against her rescue vessel, chilled wind and a sharper tang as evening darkened everything, her fists in her coat pockets releasing a little. Perhaps through sweetened tears she murmured a Paschal hymn.
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