Easter at Coho

In the cohousing community I live in, we’ve had an Easter tradition forever. Well, for 12 years, which feels like the same thing. Some parents get up early and hide eggs around the property, which includes a pretty central green, lots of flowering trees, gardens. Then all the kids come out and stand on the steps of the Common House and wait until someone – usually Stephen Z – calls out ages, so that the small fry can get a head start on the faster and nimbler primate children.

The kids wander around looking for eggs. The parents wander around helping, or taking pictures, or chatting. Sometimes making sure the hidden eggs are all found (thus heading off in advance that moment a month form now of the sulfurous smell of unhappy eggs rotting in your neighbor’s shrubbery). In the past kids have more or less competed to see who can get the biggest haul, compared basketloads of loot, and occasionally traded up or down or sideways to get the chocolate of their dreams. And there are private baskets as well, usually made by moms, so that one’s child is not subject simply to the unregulated competition of late capitalist Easter.

This year, 12 years into forever, the kids are way bigger. Some are missing, wasting the time they could have been finding treasures in the greenery on graduating from Vassar and Wesleyan, on studying political theory at Swarthmore or navigating other cultures in Chile. Some are here, but wearing makeup, or sporting those flat bill caps that signify the skater cult. They look like great big puppies, not quite ready for the world which is not quite ready for them, frolicking in the late Spring finery. I watched them as I stood in my kitchen, thinking of my own overgrown pup, back on site after a night at a friend’s house (an increasingly common weekend practice, the blessed Avoidance of Parental Gaze). Praying, in a rational and secular way, that the easy laughter between these kids would pay off later in long term friendships that survive the bracing test of differentiation and adolescent drama.

The big metal bell sounded, time to bring things to the potluck. I looked at the five pounds of early strawberries, each one organic, free range, possibly college educated. I looked at the four containers of Tcho bittersweet chocolate medallions, bought here in Santa Cruz but made in San Francisco by a company that employs my good friend Nina, and I recalled wandering to her and Greg’s house after Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, an Arcadian romp of music in Golden Gate Park, and eating those same medallions and chasing them down with a Pisco drink called a Chilcano. I looked at the coffee I’d made for the masses at the potluck: Arabian Mocha Sanani, just ground in my most awesome burr grinder, just brewed under exacting conditions of measurement and quality control (water cold and filtered, pot scoured and clean, coffee at Strong-but-not-bitter levels).

And this would be the sunny, happy story of another fairy tale Easter at the green and pleasant land of cohousing. Except for the part where I enter the Common House and see some unhappy parents wrestling with the Slight Unpleasantness of the previous night (signs of alcohol in the Common House, a number of teens on the premises, questions of justice and retribution in the air).

Well. I find my wife, and we begin dipping strawberries, and placing them on a large tray, laid with parchment paper. I know that emotions will shift, a meeting will happen and people will talk about things, and that the difficult line between teenager behavior and adult behavior will once again be contemplated, negotiated, re-imagined. And that this all will go better after chocolate covered strawberries, excellent coffee, eggs with asparagus, scones. Devilled eggs.

It is a day about resurrection, after all. A day about hiding, and finding. A day when the lost is found, mystery is present, God or the Sun is on her throne, and the devil comes dressed as an hors d’oeuvre.