Easter in New Mexico. This year, in December, I will be sixty years old. I know that sounds ancient to some of you, and hardly anything to others. I suspect my dear mother still sees me as I was in my teens, my twenties, forties, and now.
What that number means to me is that I have spent a lot of Easter Sundays in New Mexico. There were a few wayward years when I was in Texas (four years), North Carolina (355 days, and that’s another story for another time), and Kansas (two years), but other than those seven Easters and one crazy family trip to Colorado Springs, I’m pretty sure I’ve spent them all in the Land of Enchantment.
Today is a different sort of Easter Sunday. We are all subject to a Stay at Home order so that we keep ourselves and our neighbors as safe as possible It is a bittersweet day, full of memories of other Easter Sundays when we were in the midst of church connections and friends and family that we love dearly. For example, last year my parents came here from Logan, went to church at Christ Church Santa Fe with Toby and me, and then I had Easter lunch at my house with my daughter Johanna and her wife Leasa present along with Leasa’s grandmother, Barbara Medina. Toby’s daughter Felisha came and brought her sons, Enrique and Joseph. We were a group of eleven around the table and Mom and I had made ham and chicken, cream corn with green chile, and a mound of mashed potatoes. Felisha made a beautiful salad and brought pickled green chile, and Barbara made a gluten free banana pudding. Leasa brought her incredible red chile sauce, which we all ladled over my mashed potatoes.
It was the best way to spend a Sunday after church. It felt like Easter Sundays at my Grandma Ayres’ house in Tucumcari without the horde of aunts and uncles and cousins. It was a lot about the food, but more about the company.
This year is different. Toby and I watched the Godfather last night, my first time for that movie, and stayed up late for us and I slept in this morning, because really, why not? I remember several years ago when I first came to Santa Fe and we got up early for sunrise service at Christ Church. I loved that I was finally going to a church where I not only felt loved and welcomed, but I got mimosas with my Easter sunrise service. There never would have been mimosas at the Baptist Church where I grew up! And today there was no sunrise service, no mimosas.
That led me to remembering other sunrise services. One Easter weekend when I was in the second grade, my parents woke us all at 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning and whisked us off to Colorado Springs for a one-night stay. They couldn’t afford two nights in a motel and even by shortening the visit, we still all stayed in one room at the Holiday Inn, mom and dad in one bed, Belinda and her best friend, Maryanne Walker in another, me and my two brothers on the floor. We packed a lot of free sightseeing into that two-day visit, because that’s what my parents’ budget allowed, but what I remember best is Easter Sunday, first at the Garden of the Gods for sunrise service and then at the Air Force Academy chapel for church. We froze at the Garden of the Gods, but I remember holding my mom’s hand and watching the sun come up over those huge rocks. I was a farm kid whose only vacations were trips to Tres Ritos when it rained too much for dad to get into the field. Running away to Colorado for one Easter was the craziest thing I had ever known my parents to do.
There was one sunrise service at the Caprock Amphitheater near San Jon, looking out over the view to the east where it seemed you could see all the way to Arkansas. There were countless sunrise services at Ute Lake where I grew up, and one at Albuquerque’s Hoffmantown Baptist when it was in the old building near Wyoming and Menaul. We met in the parking lot and watched the sun come up over the Sandias. One year when I was at New Mexico State, my little Baptist church near campus had a sunrise service and we watched the sun come up over the Organ Mountains. I love an Easter sunrise service.
If you’re a believer, Easter Sunday is perhaps your favorite day of the year because it so affirms your faith. Even it you’re not, it’s a holiday of renewal, springtime, grace and love. And when I say springtime in New Mexico, that’s a relatively flexible term, since I have memories of occasionally hunting Easter eggs in the snow, others of sunburned Easter Sunday afternoons. I remember one Easter egg hunt at my cousin Gwen’s house in Obar when a brisk north wind kept egg hunting inside, another at my Uncle Marvin Terry’s where after lunch and hunting eggs at his and Crystell’s house on the north edge of San Jon, he took us to the sandhills out on someone’s private land. He had an old tractor innertube that we used for sledding. That night my bath water was a mix of sand and sweat.
There’s a memory of yet Easter another in the backyard of Granny Terry’s house where I was maybe six and found eggs hidden in the coffee cans surrounding her baby tomato plants. I was the youngest of the almost thirty grandchildren on the Ayres side, next to the youngest on the Terry side where there were even more cousins, so I always found the least eggs. But I still knew to look in those Folger’s cans.
This is a difficult Easter Sunday. We are exactly a month past the Governor’s first Stay at Home Order. We had all hoped that COVID-19 would be under control and we would be back together in some fashion by Easter. That was our big dividing line the date on the calendar that held hope for us all. But the Stay at Home Order remains in place, strengthened each week by some new restriction. I have no problems with the state mandates. I spent at least one Easter Sunday hunting eggs with the Governor back when our kids were small. I admire the way she and the State of New Mexico have handled and enforced restrictions. I know that her primary goal is keeping us all safe. She knows, like I do, that this is not a political issue, it is biological. Like me, she has an aging parent. Like me, she finds herself in a bit of an at-risk group. We are doing the right thing here, right now. As we learn more, we will hopefully continue to do the right thing.
So here we are. Difficult Easter Sunday. I don’t know how you plan to celebrate this day of renewal, but here’s how I’m doing it. First, I watched the Easter service on YouTube for Christ Church Santa Fe. That is my church home and the place I love to worship. I cried through the entire service, mostly because I am so lonesome for my church family, but also because I am lonesome for the people I love. I want lunch at my house with Johanna and Leasa and Barbara and Felisha and her boys and a dozen others in our family. The fact that we lost Barbara last May makes this every more poignant. And it makes me more aware than ever how much we should cherish everyone we find in our presence every day.
But not only do I want church at my church and lunch at my house. I want to be eight years old again, looking for dyed eggs in Granny Terry’s backyard. I want to be fourteen, anxious to get lunch out of the way so that Marvin can take us to the sandhills in the back of his pickup. I want to be at a sunrise service at Ute Lake, knowing that we’ll go home to Mom’s for biscuits and gravy and then back to church at the First Baptist Church in Logan for regular services before we head out to Gwen’s at Obar for Sunday dinner. I want to head to Chimayo this afternoon, something I did with Johanna the Easter after all my cancer treatments, a year when I wanted to see the Santuario de Chimayo, but didn’t feel I needed that healing dirt anymore. I want my kids to be little again, hiding eggs over and over at the Highland Park Apartments in Albuquerque, Zachary hiding one so well from Johanna that we didn’t find it until we moved out the following September. I always wondered what that smell was.
This Easter makes me melancholy for the old days, whether they were last year or when I was ten. What we’ll do today is go for a short drive, taking a picnic lunch that we’ll eat on the tailgate of the pickup somewhere safe without contact with others. I am very lucky to have a partner and husband that I so enjoy. Last night he said, “Are we enjoying our time together too much?” as though he felt guilty for how much quality time we are getting to spend together.
We have a lot of blessings, don’t we? We are all, for the most part, healthy and safe. We have memories to keep us sustained through the next month or more while we remain at home. We have spring to look forward to, even if we’re facing up to three inches of snow this evening. And we have the celebration of Easter, that glorious time of renewal and love and grace.
My best to all of you, whether you’re in New Mexico or not. Happy Easter. Hope to see you soon!