Easter on the Road

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Having grown up in a small New England town in the fifties and the sixties, tradition was having an Easter Sunday with Christian-religious movies on television, waking to Easter Baskets filled with candy eggs, chocolate bunnies and marshmallow chicks - and putting on your Sunday best in preparation for church.
I think that it's fair to say now that far less of the population in 2012 attends church on Easter Sunday. The emphasis at present is on pulling the family together for a good old fashioned Sunday dinner. The religious observance without mention of Crucifixion or Resurrection, Passover or Seder has become more a time spent remembering family. And this in itself is more holy than it appears.
With the ever shrinking family unit, Gaia Girl and myself, like two lost souls, (who are not) and who have no place for to lay our plate and spoon on this day of chocolate, marshmallow and ham (thank G_D!) drove up to Salem, MA to visit the Peabody Essex Museum.
We were especially looking forward to seeing the Yin Yu Tang house which was painstakingly disassembled in China and reassembled in the courtyard of the museum. Family members who once lived in the home that housed many generations of the same family, have visited the reconstruction of their ancestral home and stories of the emotional reunion abound.
Owing to the holiday only a handful of us were present to take the tour. We were issued a small device that is placed to your ear like a telephone and you're given a quiet and almost personal tour through each station identified by a small numbered brick. You punch in the number located on the brick and a pleasant sounding tour guide appears.
I had this type of house in mind when I wrote my book inspired(?) by the Taiping rebellion. One the main characters rented a home such as this under the guise of missionary work; here he worked the opium trade and had his way with young imported English lads. (Wha??)
I digress...
We had a pleasant lunch afterwards at Passage to India and headed off to Peabody to visit what is left of Gaia Girl's family. We had tea and great conversation and returned home with a delicious Easter cookie in hand.
And it was sweet.



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