GOOD FRIDAYS

I began this morning - Good Friday 2018 - in a text conversation with my sister.  We were both in preparations for guests for the Easter weekend and were sort of comparing notes on our progress.  She confessed to being in her usual Hot Cross bun panic and wanted to know how much mashed potatoes I used when I made mine. 

She is the family expert in this field; for the life of me I can't think why she would ask me about a recipe she has been amazing her neighbours with for at least two decades, but she did.  And I had to confess that I had cheated.  I don't use the time-honoured, handed-down-through-the-generations, made-with-mashed-potatoes recipe mom used, I throw together my normal, never fail recipe and added grated orange rind, raisins and cinnamon to Easter them up a bit.  She told me that this made mine "fake buns" and the conversation ended there.  Either she got too busy with her day to keep texting, or I've been excommunicated from the family.

I had plenty to do too: I had company coming as well.

As I worked other Good Fridays stirred through my memories - at my age there are quite a few of them.  The most poignant involves another sister.  One who lived close enough that when she sent out her invitation for a Hot Cross bun feast on Good Friday afternoon we could be there to join in the food and fellowship.  She was as famous for her Easter gatherings as the sister in Alberta is for hers, and I miss her dearly on a lot of days, but absolutely on Good Friday.

The tradition of inviting the neighbourhood for fresh Hot Cross buns probably goes back further in the family, but my earliest memories are of Mom snipping crosses into the buns and then filling those marks with icing when they were cooked and cooled.  Mom loved being a hostess and shone in that role - genetics that Fate kind of skimped on for me.  I can, and have, fed housefuls of people but I always feel a bit overwhelmed by it.  Mom always looked like she revelled in it - a profile in courage and hard work in my books.

But all my Good Friday memories weren't about buns.  It was a visit on a Good Friday 46 years ago that was the starting point of my first marriage.  Of course we didn't know the future that afternoon, but for some reason individual memories of that day stand out, crystalized in time.  It was a good Good Friday.

Another one that came to mind wasn't so great.  It was the Easter after my parents' marriage broke up - hard times for us all, especially Dad.  He and my three youngest siblings had come to spend Easter with us and I had served salmon loaf for supper when they arrived (why do I remember that?).  It was a sad, long weekend with all of us not knowing what to say.

A Good Friday many years later also stars my Dad.  He and his new wife were visiting, the day was very warm for early spring.  I was wearing an old T-shirt, had rolled up the bottom of my pant legs and was barefoot as I mopped the kitchen floor; I have always wondered what it was about me that day -  my body language?  life attitude? actual physical appearance?  that moved him to put his arm around my shoulder and say "You look so much like your mother!"  There was no doubt to me that I was being given a wonderful compliment.  He never stopped loving her. 

I remembered the family gatherings too, one blending into another - especially in our early married years when the young couples and their little ones would flock home to bask in the togetherness of grown-up siblings and new cousin connections.  Happy times playing cards at Grandma's kitchen table between her noon feast and her supper spread.  Life was so simple, so sweet, so innocent.

Somehow I find that I'm the Grandma now.  I try to live up to the role; I've stocked up on chocolate, freshened up the guest beds, and planned several meals days in advance so I can visit too.  There is also a chance I have lost standing in my family because I made a batch of  Hot Cross buns which, apparently, are fake. 

But they sure are good.