Our Passover prep started about a week ago. Day after day we chose a room, a project, vacuuming, polishing, sorting. attacking the pyramid of books on the night table. I went through a variety of purses I’ve traveled with this year, looking for forgotten contraband - stray protein bars especially. I did the annual cleaning off of my desk, with the traditional triumphant whoop - I can see the wood!
Unsure if we still had the collective strength for the task, together we lifted our mattress, the box spring, both encased in a wood frame rendering them inaccessible for 364 days of the year. But in the end, we managed and found the odd mementoes that had made their way underneath - My watch! I wondered where that had disappeared to - some newspapers and tissues and the usual loose change. Each room, hard to do, but especially our bedroom and the kitchen.
It’s been many years since I’ve been without a couple or a team of cleaners, a generous daughter to help bear the brunt of powerful scrubbing, endless trips to the basement and attic, heavy lifting, all easing the way to the seder table. This year I had real fear - just the two of us tackling this house, it won’t get done, it won’t happen, we don’t have the strength we had in our 20s, 30s, even 50s. We are the senior generation, the vulnerable ones, at high risk.
The kitchen gleams, I smell the self-cleaning oven work its final magic. Tonight or tomorrow morning we will fill the now empty cupboards with boxes of matzah, with olive oil, with fresh spices, a bag of dried figs… The empty refrigerator will receive its cottage cheese, its butter, its jam, its mushrooms and salmon. And then the cooking will begin. For two.
I imagine like most of us I’ve been trying to envision and have been avoiding envisioning what it will look and feel like Wednesday night, my table set with its accustomed seder plate, the extraordinary ceramic Elijah’s cup, the wooden chalice for Miriam. And two place settings, no extra leaves required. The image knocks the breath out of me - no family gathering downstairs to fill the salt water bowls and shell endless pistachios for the Sephardic charoset, no friends coming through the door with strawberries and wine and chocolates and questions they’ve prepared, both ancient and new.
This morning I had my breakfast on the porch. I listened to the birds, the sweetest spring cacophony. I remembered a poem I had written a long time ago in which I wondered about bird conversation in the morning - what were they saying - and decided it was like children and teens, telling each other their dreams. The birds and the poem reminded me of youth and hope, anticipation of the future.
And isn’t that one way of looking at Pesach and the seder - the excitement and joy and terror and wonder - we don’t know the future, we’ve never known the future, but tonight we celebrate leaving behind our enslavement, our stuckness, the old suffocating ways. the narrowness that inhibits our best selves. With hearts bursting open, we are running into the future. As I used to say to the friends I’d call just before the seder began, I’ll be looking for you when we are all going out of Egypt tonight. The seder, it turns out, is still about what it has always been about, an act of imagination and hope - just what I need now.
For Pesach poems, prose, writing prompts and seder questions, see the program also on this site titled Reaching for Meaning at the Seder Table.