From Dust Bunnies to Easter Bunnies
Create a clean house for me, O Lord
How was everyone’s Easter?
If you are Jewish, how was your Passover?
I always appreciate how the two days go down through the centuries together, linked together in the calendar. They move this way and that way, but they move together.
Anyway. My holiday weekend grew chaotic, as holiday weekends do, particularly when you are singing with a church choir, which I am, and/or you are the host of the family gathering, which I was. I tend to judge myself harshly after these affairs, and this year my complaint to myself is that I spent too much time cleaning and not so much time cooking.
As long as the house is not a total dump, nobody cares about the cleaning!
Nobody comes home from your Easter dinner and says: “She had the cleanest house!” What would they rather remember? The delicious, tangy, deep purple berry pie! We did have that. My brother-in-law David made it.
The flip side of this, though, is that now I do have a pretty clean house. Well, cleaner than it was. That was my secret agenda when I invited everyone over. You absolutely have to have people over now and then. Otherwise your house grows hopeless.
And so I spent most of Holy Saturday spring cleaning. I had done some decluttering earlier in the week — yay me! — and then I kind of put off the rest because, you know the rule, work expands to fill the time available for its completion. I dragged out the Shark vacuum cleaner vacuumed all the carpets. Even the stairs.
That was a task I had been dreading! I kept putting off vacuuming the stairs because the Little Pig, the Shop Vac I bought with my mom at a garage sale, is out of service. The hose is torn. The Pig is perfect for getting into crevices — it pokes and grunts, and your dirt is gone. I will have to fix the Little Pig. But the Shark did almost as well.
Another task I kept putting off: cleaning tiled floors. The foyer needed this treatment, and so did the downstairs bathroom. What I learned to do: Set a timer. Ten minutes each room. Big bucket of water, Dollar Tree floor cleaner, and a rag. Done. That killed me. Here I had been putting this off for how long? And it wound up taking 15 minutes.
But, you know, everywhere you look, something else needs to be done. It is insane, really. It never ends.
At some point you have to pour a glass of wine and just start having fun!
Which we did on Easter Sunday, in the hours before dinner. My friends Janet and Brenda came over and we assembled a cheese board…
… and colored eggs. Look at those colors. I had the Deluxe Paas decorating kit!
Haha I had to leave the glass of wine in the picture!
The cheese board included Munster cheese and Camambert, and a third cheese I love that comes from Aldi and has the greatest name. Can you guess what it is? It has a beautiful blue wrapper. It is Borgonzola!
We also added radishes I had bought from Aldi. They were delicious, so sweet! Brenda decided she liked radishes after all.
It is thanks to that cheese board …
… that I have to go back on this diet, starting here, starting now. I had artificial intelligence put me on a diet and I was doing great until this cheese board came along. Well, that diet is a whole other story.
Well, when you have to make diet resolutions you know it was a great holiday. And this Easter was.
Easter is the greatest day.
The end of Lent, need I say more??
At church we sing the Gloria again after weeks of mostly not singing it. That is always a moment I love. Sometimes I start crying.
Here we are at St. Louis Church on Sunday morning singing the Gloria.
My videos are not the greatest because were I to take a decent video, I would have to stop singing, and stopping singing is just not something I am able to do. And in this case my voice is kind of quavery because I am getting teary.
I had to, just had to, film our opening number …
… because the hymn, “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” it is my favorite Easter hymn. As it was my father’s. If you look you will see my friend Brenda, who colored the Easter eggs and assembled the cheese board, in the front row of the choir. Nobody else in the world has hair like Brenda’s.
The video does not bring across the sheer volume of the music. Our director, Frank Scinta, he has endless imagination and power.
Listen to how he ends this hymn. Amazing!
It is times like this that I realize that much as I admire Martha, the Gospel’s domestic goddess, my real name is Mary.
Though I have to admit …
I do love that I have a clean house!
Wait a minute, AI does diets? You will have to write about that!
Having people over causes me to break out the fuzzy pole duster to clean the cove molding! Does the deluxe Paa’s dye kit have the copper wire egg dipper, or has it gone plastic?