Happy Easter (Macaroni and Cheese, and Cherry Pie)

Dear Grandma,

You were dyeing Easter eggs when I arrived this time. Making them for Grandpa's Easter basket, which you will take to him at the nursing home. He loves candy, and will be getting Peeps and some chocolate, and of course, the eggs that you dyed for decoration. You didn't have any artificial food dyes on hand, so you were dyeing the eggs the way your mother used to do it - using onion skins in boiling water. The onion skins, when boiled, will gently stain the eggs to varying shades of brown, depending on how long you leave the eggs in. She would also use beet juice, you said. When I was home the next morning, I tried this natural method of dyeing eggs, and threw in a teabag for fun. The eggs swirled around in the tea-and-onion-skin water for about twenty minutes, and when I was finished, I had three beautiful, soft brown eggs to put in a little basket. For some reason, I find I like these dyed eggs so much more than the artificially-colored ones.

The menu this time was macaroni and cheese, peas, salt-rising bread and cherry pie for dessert. You gave me the night off from preparing dessert. "Don't worry about bringing anything," you said. You had been making pie crusts to make a lemon meringue pie for Easter, using your son's pie crust recipe - my towering, gruff-looking uncle who looks a bit like Santa Claus in the off-season, and who you'd never know loves to cook and bake - and you had extra pie dough left over, so you made a cherry pie for us. We drank tea out of the blue cups and saucers, and we didn't read our tea leaves this time, although I noticed you had a new tea leaf-reading book sitting underneath your old one on the dining room table.

Your house was filled with fresh flowers - roses, daisies, verbinium in little pots. The roses were multicolored and smelled divine. Your house gets this way every Easter, due to your many grown-up children sending you bouquets for the holiday. My own parents have a pot of yellow daisies sitting on the dining room table, which they will be giving you this Sunday. It reminded me of when I was in Great Britain a couple years ago, and we visited Anne Hathaway's cottage on a sunny spring day in March. What a charming cottage that was with its hearth fireplace, stone floors and leaded windows. But one of the things that struck me the most was the heady scent of fresh bouquets on the thick wooden table in the kitchen and throughout the house - hyacinth and daffodills, and many other spring blossoms arranged in vases, giving splashes of color to each room in the cottage. There's something timeless about a vase of flowers on a table. People have been bringing flowers indoors for ages - I imagine Anne Hathaway, pregnant with Shakespeare's child, moving slowly through the gardens around the cottage to collect a bouquet and bring it inside to cheer up the room. She probably enjoyed flowers on her table, and now you have flowers on yours. Some day, when I have a little home and garden, I want to have a garden just for cutting, and have fresh flowers on my table each day, like Anne may have done.

We talked some about the birds in your garden - spring was well on its way, until a wintry blast came in and delivered more snow and icy weather. Robins have been hopping about in confusion, their rusty breasts in contrast to the white ground; goldfinches have been getting their summer color back, but not in sync with the countryside getting her green back. Birdfeeders are very popular right now. We watched goldfinches and purple finches, juncos and sparrows hopping and swooping between feeders in your backyard. At home there is a pair of cardinals that I have been watching for the past two months or so. The male is stunningly gorgeous in his bright red feathers against the winter backdrop, and the female more subtly pleasing in her golden ones. He is always in pursuit of her and she is always retreating, leading him on, literally from tree to tree. He always pursues. I think that with that kind of persistence, he will win her in the end.

You mentioned getting a quote for the house from a contractor who would redo the exterior in vinyl siding. The house has never been sided; it's always been painted and the paint is peeling off in many places. You would like to put siding on in a nice grayish, greenish, white, you said. You are also thinking about replacing the windows, which are original to the house and don't fit well now that the house has aged and settled. Come this November, you will have lived in this house for sixty years. Sixty years. I asked if you were the longest-time resident of Cherry Street. No, you said, Mrs. Hicks down on the corner of Washburn was living there when you moved in in 1947. She still lives in that butter-yellow house on the corner, across the street from her grandson, the one who owns Gates Creek Cafe.

You were making plans for Easter dinner. You were "collecting the orphans" you said, finding out who didn't have plans already and inviting them to your house for ham and lemon meringue pie. My family will be coming. Again I find it intriguing, the way you have a desire for some things spiritual like reading tea leaves, praying before meals, and celebrating Christian holidays like Easter, but I'm not sure where you stand with God. You ask me to pray each time now before we have dinner. I don't know if you are planning to attend church on Easter Sunday, but I know that you are taking pains to prepare a meal for the family in celebration of it. I have prayed for you several times, and I'm hoping to be open to conversations about spiritual things, even though I'm not the greatest evangelist. I truly want you to know the Lord and to belong to Him, but I don't know how to tell you that you need Jesus. I hope that death is not so much like the popular-and-terrifying evangelical play Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames, where you realize you are dead and the decision about your eternal destiny has already been made, but I hope that death is more like C.S. Lewis' book The Great Divorce, where mercy continues and you still have a chance to choose Jesus after death, and grow into one of the Solid People.