Stratford Landing

Otherwise the drive was not unpleasant. Co-eds were out in force in their cut-off shorts and tank tops and sunglasses and also in tennis and running shoes that gave their step and their pony tails an extra bounce. Graduate students were studying outside coffee shops and under shade trees in little open squares like Stratford Landing (that halfway reminded me of Paris) with books open across their knees or in their laps. Young mothers were pushing strollers with Sunbrellas, and over the ether, a newscast on the casualties in Basra was pleasantly cut short in favor of the Louvin Brothers.

It is a crystal clear day with almost zero cloud cover, save for some contrails that have split the sky and dissolved, and quite warm even for late-May. It is after all the kind of day that makes you think of sunscreen—or sunburn—and global warming almost instantly: wisteria in the air now and the trees and shrubs are Technicolor green. The Northern Lights and the Brick Ruffles (my favorites) and the Jack Sands are all in bloom now despite last year’s drought (they step down in great sweeping cascades of color across our lawn and the lawns of our neighbors), though too late for Easter, when the children of St. Aidan’s process from the chapel to the church and up the aisle to place fresh flowers at the base of the wood and wire cross until the altar is overflowing with color.

This year for Easter we were given a surprisingly adult dose of sleet and snow that began on Good Friday and ran through to Easter Monday (which is of course no longer a holiday). We lost power once or twice over the weekend, became fully dependent on wood heat and candle light, and the morning services were canceled.

At the evening service gone were the awkward, sheepish “alleluias” from Lent: they were replaced instead with an echo of silence after Father Reynolds pronounced the Resurrection, as though the utterance of praise had finally been drummed completely out of us and for good. The children’s processional was cut in half due to black ice on the brick sidewalks out front, so the children stood (in their dungarees and down vests and leather boots) in the narthex until they were signaled to begin. Tromping lead-footed down the aisle the children put the frozen nubs of bulbs and sprouts and bruised flowers on the altar anyway, and while the sentiment was there, the resulting effect was a deep, deep grayness and dreariness that made my heart sink.

We had long desired the release of spring and warmer weather and we received instead an extended sentence in a purgatorial winter. Even Reynolds must have felt it a week in advance. He must have known ahead of time that we were rushing headlong into conflict with nature, given his phoned-in sermon about a popular novel and film that had called into question the celibacy of Christ and the actuality of his death, and by extension his resurrection. That Reynolds felt this current, but fleeting, cultural icon was something that needed addressing further in the public dialogue was somewhat of a surprise to many of us and indicated that either a) we had vastly overestimated the intelligence of our fellow seekers, our Christian brethren or b) the good Father himself just wasn’t feeling it.

His must be a difficult yoke to wear day in and day out.

In short, everything about the day was the opposite of the renewal and the rebirth that I and so many others had been looking for after our long and painful exile in February. We had all (some more so than others) been clock-watching and calendar-turning for weeks now, looking for something to break apart and give way, and the sound of the frozen precipitation pinging the stained glass windows during the confession of sins made me want to cry.

But today. Today is the day. Today is the day we are shedding that dark robe of death. We are shedding that heavy, heavy mantle of destruction and despair and trading it in for Bill Monroe, for Foggy Mountain Breakdown, for the Osborne Brothers, for the Sunday Times and for the Post, for tennis in the afternoon, later for some gin, and perhaps some grass-fed steaks on the grill.