spring has risen?

a big transition cometh

On April 18th, I swam for the first time this year. The high temperature hit about 84 degrees, and passing storms pressed thick humidity down onto the Valley. It was a glimmer of the summer that enchanted me before, full of long afternoons sunbathing with my feet in water. Chasing that feeling, I headed to the creek. Snow melt from the mountains had raised the water level to new heights, covering the flat rocks people used to set up on for picnics. There was enough stone shore to spread out a towel and eat grapes, and six people were submerged in the rushing, clear water. One of which was a summer regular, a man in a straw hat and a long plaid skirt who would often nap in churning pools while his wife read from a Kindle in a folding chair. Another regular, a paddleboarder, gingerly leapt from stone to stone before scaling the rock scramble back to the parking lot like a mountain goat.

I asked a woman with wet hair heading out if it was cold.

“Absolutely freezing,” she replied. I smiled, and rushed to get my t-shirt off.

My first swims of the season are always like this, the kind of cold that turns your skin pink even after you’ve acclimated. When I moved here, I was told you could swim from April to October, which is almost my schedule back home (I can’t say I would dare go in Lake Michigan in April). Putting my feet in the freezing creek took me back to all of my late May swims, once even immortalized in the Tribune. I loved the cold water then, and I love it now.

This is all to say, it is warm here now. The seasons are changing, or rather, they have changed drastically. It’s Easter Sunday, and for the first time in eight years, Orthodox and Catholic Easter are aligning. Today I am writing to you from the past. I mean, I’m always writing to you from the past, but I’m marking today specifically. To the chagrin of my parents–my father, the son of a devout Catholic and my mother, the daughter of a sentimental Greek–this means a half-and-half celebration. The day will be spent ferrying around the city making sure little cousins receive Easter baskets and all grandparents are kissed. They will have to think strategically about how much pastitio and potatoes they eat before they are faced with long counters lined with ham, arroz con gandules, and flan. I will not be there.¹

Like the streams making their way to the Hudson, maybe we all find our way home. My time in the Hudson Valley is running out and my return to the Great Lakes is nigh, so I have decided to spend the holiday on my own here (and you’ll see how I spent it in the R.R.C). Funnily enough, I actually had work, but it was still a ridiculously gorgeous day. The trees right now are covered in tight, lime green buds. Some have already burst forward, like the crab apple trees that are now full of blush pink blossoms. Lawns are carpeted in violets and pansies, accompanying the daffodils and Siberian squill that have been blooming since late March. There are flowers I’ve never actually seen before but read about, like forget-me-nots and periwinkles. I rarely stray off of paths to avoid accidentally crushing grape hyacinth, a new favorite flower that clusters like blueberries. It’s like a fairy tale. All that’s missing are the lambs and the princesses, but I’m sure those are around here somewhere.

I am not used to this kind of Easter. For a strange reason, Easter in the midwest is always melancholy. This year, in Chicago, it rained hard. There is a rawness to our early spring that always leaves me wanting–Wanting winter to truly end with no fits and starts of fake warm weather, wanting green to replace the brown that covers everything until one day it doesn’t. I have speculated many times on why Easter feels this way, and I can’t find a real answer. Maybe it’s because it’s always a Sunday, so we eat on white people time in the early afternoon and are left facing the dread of school or work in the evening. We drive home from my abuela’s house at dusk, quiet. No amount of Easter candy or cash cradled in plastic eggs can rid you of that feeling.

In this train of thought, every Easter marks a new season of transition as you enter spring. It has a similar flavor to that first week of January where everything is the same yet somehow different. You have to face the fact that you are not the same person you were last year. Neither are your little cousins either. Once at your hip, they’re coming up to your shoulder now, telling you about the books they're writing or how much they hate their homework. Some years these differences feel starker than others. This time last year, I was digging my heels in against time as my college graduation loomed on the horizon. New York was something that was going on my graduation announcement, a dream not yet realized. Now it’s soon to be a memory, and I am facing a similar foe: a Major Life Event. It’s time to say goodbye again.

I grew up preferring Greek Easter, as my grandfather has dubbed Orthodox Easter, because of its consistency for coming mostly later in spring. The sun sets later, so we usually spent the long hours outside in my aunt’s backyard with a soft breeze. Greek Easter is already on the other side of that amorphous transition period, distracted by the gentle promise of a golden summer. Some years it coincided with my Taurian sister’s birthday, and the festivities doubled. I am fond of the bright red eggs that symbolize the blood of Christ, and the game we play-tsougrisma-that brings you good luck through the year. Maybe my good luck started instantly as soon as the shells cracked, pulling this version of the holiday ahead of its Catholic competitor.

This was the first Catholic Easter where I was not sad come the end of my holiday meal, and I think it entirely to do with this being a honest-to-God spring. It is slow moving here, not startling, and constant in the surprises it delivers. In college, I would blink and the trees would be filled in. If I paid attention enough I could enjoy the hyacinths if I wasn’t whisked away by biting winds. Yes, I had many beautiful days hammocking, kicking my Birks aside like a stereotypical liberal arts student. Don’t think I am not grateful for those moments. But for the most part, spring was just a stepping stone to summer with maybe a week or two of peonies and a milder kind of cold.

The warmth here has held since Easter, giving me time to savor it. On my way home from work yesterday, I stopped to pick flowers, hoping to identify the new ones that finally burst open. I danced over violets to make sure I didn’t squish any, only taking the flowers that had already begun to dry at the edges of their blooms. A breeze caught my linen skirt, and I felt a little whimsy seeping into my life. I felt that whimsy too when I went back to the creek, and my roommate and I were the only people there. I felt like a naiad–a Classical water nymph– crouched on the flat gray boulders and watching swallows compete for holes in the cliff faces. I was at home with the smell of moss and rushing water, the eagles and the black bears that like that part of town.

Last winter, I themed my birthday party around gods and goddesses. Many of my divine guests leaned Greek and Roman, although we had an appearance from Christ Himself and Mother Earth. We hung white streamers from the ceiling to mimic columns in a temple. I dressed myself as Persephone, the Greek goddess of spring, toting around a giant ceramic bottle of wine in the shape of a pomegranate. I sprayed magnolia perfume and hoped that in the thick of January, I could give my guests a taste of spring. I surprised myself a little with the choice. Why not grey-eyed Athena, or Artemis?

Truthfully, I wanted that Disney princess aesthetic, that maiden of the meadow vibe that stands so stark in comparison to the Persephone’s home in the Underworld. It’s part of what makes her character so compelling, especially when she becomes queen of her time-share in hell. For one night, and one night only, I wanted to be the being that made the seasons change, that sprung forward from deep in the earth bringing life in her wake. I imagine flowers blooming in Persephone’s footsteps as she waltzes out of the Underworld, perfuming the wind with lilac and sunshine.

Although I wore a chiton that night and smudged my eyes with gold, I think the closest I will ever get to Persephone is right now. As I gather up bouquets and spend evening after evening in my backyard barefoot in the grass, I feel myself moving forward with the changing seasons. I know this spring is temporary. It is bringing me closer to the next phase of my life, including a new home after almost a year making one here. But isn’t the beauty of this experience that everything had to align for it to happen, even just once? I’ll revisit this in some other Substack, but think on it. How lucky to have even one spring in this place.

So I will relish it as much as I can. I will get in the creek while it’s freezing because I will not have another summer here. I did the same thing last May when I said goodbye to Lake Michigan in the final shocks of nostalgia before graduation. Lord knows I will do it all over again.

Thank you, always, for stopping by,

EAV

R.R.C

So you want to know what I made for Easter. I decided on making a very focused Greek meal rather than an American or Latine spread.² I slow roasted lamb shoulder in a lemon and dill marinade over tiny yellow potatoes, and accompanied it with maroulosalata (a sharp lettuce salad with cucumbers, feta, and dill but no tomatoes) and a mountain tea Arnold Palmer.

I am tempted to cram this R.R.C with yearning for my favorite spring produce or nostalgia for childhood holiday meals, but I also think there is a beautiful lesson here in cooking for oneself versus an entire family. For instance, with the lamb, I’ve only made roast lamb as the entire leg which is somehow always more than enough. The task of downscaling for just me posed an interesting challenge. How could I achieve the same flavors and quality with about an eighth of the star ingredient?

When I moved into my first apartment, I struggled with buying too much in terms of groceries, so used to my dad and sister coming along as scavengers. I subsequently cooked too much as a result, a perk for my roommates but a stressor for me and my wallet. I tried meal prepping, but quickly grew frustrated with the monotony of it. I wanted diverse meals, which meant diverse ingredients and long grocery list. On top of all that, being the roommate that’s finicky about eggs and brands of kimchi also made me feel awkward and out of place, doing too much when I should be a humble college student. In short, it was a stressful transition from coasting on dining hall mediocrity.

The first grocery receipts and carts brimming with brown bags made me sweat. I don’t know why these shopping trips terrified me, or why I put so much pressure on myself to buy or make the perfect amount of food. Perhaps it was genetically encoded, tracing back to my family in the Great Depression. Food is important always but especially when you are struggling. Every meal counts. I have not forgotten the importance of this necessity, and I feel its weight on me as I have the privilege of grocery stores in place of ration booklets.

One of my roommates when I first moved out, a biology student turned botanist, reassured me about the learning curve of living on your own and helped me with my stress. She came from a big family, and understood what it was like to cook and shop for others. For reference, she was one of the first people I turned to go with me to Costco. The night we unloaded our very first shop in our sticky apartment, she said only one thing to me. I still carry it with me: It’s okay– it will all be eaten.

And she was right. It always is, both okay and eaten. I ultimately got better at my ratios and portions, cooking just enough for me to have a leftover lunch and not feel stifled with a repeating menu. I found myself losing my anxiety around buying and cooking my own food, reframing my kitchen into a puzzling challenge rather than a suffocating one. Meet it first with logic, then fill in the rest. In the case of my conundrum–how do I translate an Easter meal for one–I chose a much smaller cut of lamb, and cooked it the way I was used to with much shorter time to account for its size. Lacking my usual equipment, I used a stainless steel pan rather than a giant braising pan. I didn’t have to worry about anyone else’s dietary restrictions so I marinated my lamb for 24 hours in a thick bath of lemon juice, garlic, oregano, and paprika. I put it in an oven low and slow with a healthy glug of white wine. It was the best lamb I’ve had in a long time.

Don’t let the kitchen scare you, especially if you’re growing into your skills as a cook. Be easy, be flexible, and give yourself grace. Someway, somehow, it will all be eaten.

1. This entry could be about homesickness, but shockingly this is not my favorite holiday. My FOMO for Easter is manageable.

2. I cook way more Cuban/Mexican/Boricua/Latin food than I cook Greek food, so it’s only fair.