Bay Area Easter(ish)

sofiagkMay 5, 2024May 5, 2024

“Mommy, that building has a cross on top”, says Philip, checking out the church of the Holy Cross in Belmont.
“Yes, churches have crosses on top”.
“But we don’t go to church mommy. We go to the mosque”
To be honest kid, we hardly even go to church, I thought, but decided to correct his confusion kindly – the life of a mobile immigrant kid eh?

This is not my first rodeo, as they say in this new place (or at least as I imagine they do, due to the films I’ve watched growing up). I’ve had over twenty years of various celebrations in foreign lands. My principle has always been that home is wherever I find myself and so have never had an issue with celebrating there. I know the London churches – Easter being a cultural convention of which I have fond memories and refuse to give up – I know where to find ingredients for traditional baking and I’ve known how to host Christmases and Easters for assorted family, friends and visiting Greeks as well as slightly bemused non Greeks.

Growing up, I had known that it was Easter and that I was home due to the smells and the sounds of these days. The baking, the egg painting, the poppies all around the countryside, the excellent hymns of the week preceding Easter Sunday. But also, the family gossip, the little petty grievances remembered and then quickly forgotten, the dancing, the exhaustion, the drinking. I was the kid in someone else’s kitchen for years and I can’t tell you the joy I felt when I hosted Easter for the family at my house at the village – not grandma’s, not mom’s, my house, with its infuriating refurbishment history and a garden designed for over 30 people to celebrate together. Regardless, I don’t remember ever feeling sad to be celebrating abroad – Christmas day spent on the London couch watching movies and eating melomakarona being a blissful memory and distance never having been an issue.

Well, it turns out, the West Coast of the United States is really, really, fucking far.

There is a little silk thread, that goes all the way to my people and I’ve stretched it and I’ve played with it and I’ve done all sorts of spells so that it keeps the connection and now I can hear it’s murmur, the stitches protesting under the strain.

In my dream the other night, I walked all the way down to the river and sat under the sycamore tree to wait. There is a temporary peace there, a sense of retreat and relaunch. My sister came, to sit beside me, to keep the silence as she always knows how to.

Thinking about this logically… even though the fucking nostalgia I’ve avoided all these years is not logical… it’s probably the novelty of this place. The weather, the currency, the banking system, the housing (oh by all the gods, the housing) and the weirdness that creeps in because I yearn for some sort of normality and that, I know better than most, takes time.

And yet, I’m nothing if not persistent. I found the international store, I found mahlab and mastic. I found the churches and the hymns – sung half in English half in Greek, when I prefer the somewhat impenetrable Greek original which lulls you into a stupor when you stop paying attention. I held a candle and explained to Philip why Lazarus seems to be wearing bandages on the wall painted icons.

But that is not where I found solace.

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I spent this Saturday with Philip standing on the other side of the kitchen island, teaching him how to shape the Easter koulourakia, little bites of sugary and orangey goodness. He asked me questions and I found myself talking to him about my mother’s kitchen, the Easter recipes and the traditions. We stood there for hours, shaping the dough and baking the cookies, in Mountain View, on the West Coast, a grand total of 10.931,21 kilometers in a straight line from my people – my silk thread performing miracles once more.

So, you know, I found Easter(ish) this Saturday and the kid helped me get there, coming for a little stroll with me through memory.

Happy Easter – wherever you may roam.