The Winds of Change are Blowing

Sitting here, I can hear the wind snapping at the roof.   The leaves on the trees are bending and swaying as if they alone can dance to the musical hum of the whipping wind.  Listening to the symphony of shingles shifting and the pool cover flapping against the cement, I realize the inside of my house is oddly silent.  The television is off, my IPod is quiet, no one is speaking and nothing is running in the background – no dishwasher or washing machine.  The house is truly quiet except for the music of nature.

Every so often a stronger wind gust blows some unsuspecting sand off our back patio, it swirls rapidly before once again settling into a new home on the pavers.  I guess in many ways, the sand in the wind is like my life.   The winds of change are blowing me out of my comfort zone.  Where I am settled now may soon be quite different from where the winds will drop me; a new place that is hopefully close to where I am now, but different enough to warrant adjustment.

This past weekend was a holiday weekend.  Passover was celebrated in our home; while Easter was celebrated in the homes of many people we love and care about.  Honestly, Passover was never one of my favorite holidays.  I remember having a discussion with our Rabbi many years ago about what I felt to be the incongruence of the celebration.  The story we tell at the Seder consists of the celebratory tale of the Jewish peoples’ exodus from slavery in Egypt.  It celebrates freedom.  In short, the Jews had to exit their homes quickly, so there was no time for their bread to rise.  In honor of this fast exit, we eat unleavened food for the duration of the holiday.

My beef with this celebration is that it was the time that the Jews lacked, not the ingredients…therefore, it seems we should need to eat fast food this week, be forced to eat in restaurants, not cook at all!  But, instead, we labor in the kitchen for hours preparing foods to work as substitutes for what we enjoy the rest of the year.  Substitute foods are prepared; foods that never taste as good as the real thing.  (Some may try to argue this point with me and say how much they enjoy Passover food.  If that were true, why wouldn’t bakeries sell Passover cakes and cookies all year round?  I’ll tell you why; they taste like the sand on which the Jews traveled for 40 years, the sand that is whipping around my patio!)

Contrast Passover with Easter.  On Good Friday, Jesus was crucified.  On Sunday, he was reborn.  If this were a Jewish holiday, we would have to push pins through our hands or starve all day to relate to his suffering on Friday.  On Sunday, we would celebrate his rebirth by perhaps lighting a birthday candle, Yippee!!  For a people that really do know how to party, our holiday celebrations don’t do us justice.  Why can’t we celebrate our freedom with decorated, beautiful cakes, gifts, spring colors, and smiles instead of dipping bitter herbs and drowning gefilte fish was beet stained horseradish? 

As always, I “keep” Passover in my own way.  I don’t eat the bread, cake, cookies, crackers, peas and corn as I do the other 357 days of the year.  I don’t clean out my house of all bread products because my daughter and I are the only ones in the house who try to restrain from eating these foods.  Because of this, religious Jews would obviously say I am not keeping Passover.  To them I say, you’re right.  But, my daughter and I keep it our way out of respect for who we are and out of hope that one day, someone will stand up and say…they didn’t run out of bread, they ran out of time!!  And on that miraculous day, Jews all over the world will rush to various fast food outlets and nosh to their hearts delight for the eight days of Passover! 

There are changes that are happening, however, as the consistent beating of the wind against my window reminds me.  These changes are on a personal level.  I write often about my children being adults now. Thoughts of downsizing our home, ridding ourselves of so many accumulated odds and ends, looking down the road at being empty nesters…these changes like that grain of sand being blown in the air by a sudden wind and forced to settle into a new reality.  The shifting of reality, the day-to-day changes that seem overnight but really have been taking incremental steps for decades, these changes are reaching a new plateau.  Life is change…like the song says, “The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.”

I hope the winds of change result in all of us landing in an interesting, comfortable new place.  Happy Holidays everyone, no matter what you celebrate, take pride and joy in being you.   Whether eating the sweets of Passover or Easter, or just the sweets of an ordinary day, beneath it all we should always remember that the only sweetness of any importance is the sweetness we offer one another.