Easter
Patricia O'Donnell
We want to believe that when spring comes, when the darkness recedes and the snow finally melts, that we have reached some final threshold, and after we step over it, we will fall headlong into an endless dream of sunshine and warmth. We forget that spring is only one in a sequence of thresholds, and the house is a circle; the moment we say “Spring is here,” it means that winter is on its way once again, or we are traveling toward it. In the spring breeze is the bite of winter; in the mid-day sunshine the scratchy throat, the headache, the night that seems to never end.
On the day before Easter, my son says he is coming for the night, along with his two little girls. Their mother is in treatment again for opiate addiction. It is her third stay in this particular center.
At our home in central Maine it snows on Black Saturday, the day Jesus was laid in the tomb. April 19, and wet snow falls on the hard mud of our driveway, on the mounds of dirty snow remaining at the edges of the lawn. I buy jelly beans and pink fists of tulips in a plastic tub at the grocery store and put them on the kitchen table. From the attic, I drag down ragged straw baskets. The head gasket in my son’s old Volvo is failing, the “needs service” light on all the way from Boston, but they arrive, the baby and the toddler unbuckled from car seats, diapers wet.
The baby is coming down with a cold and she coughs, coughs all night in the unself-conscious, heartbreaking way babies cough, and at times her high, sad wail fills the old house. My husband sleeps, pillow over his head, dreaming his dreams. The toddler crawls into our bed just past dawn. “The sun comed up!” she says, and rests on the pillow, thumb in mouth, round eyes looking at me.
At the kitchen window, early light filters through a haze of fog. We will, finally, have sunshine. From the sink my son turns, baby on his arm. She smiles at me, eyes wet, and rubs her small hand across her nose. Her lashes stick together, and she is more beautiful than a movie star. The tulip buds have spread, opening, their pink, fleshy skin, becoming soft in the harsh and hesitant light.
Patricia O'Donnell
Patricia O’Donnell is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she teaches fiction writing in the BFA Program in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Agni Review, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals and anthologies. Her novel, Necessary Places, was published by Cadent Publishing (now part of Tilbury House). Her memoir, Waiting to Begin, was published in August, 2016 by Bottom Dog Press. Her collection of short fiction, Gods for Sale, won the Serena McDonald Kennedy Fiction Award for 2016, and was published by Snake Nation Press. Her novel, The Vigilance of Stars, was published in the spring of 2019 by Unsolicited Press. It was chosen by Lily King to be one of two books read statewide in the Maine Humanities Council 2020 "Read ME" program.