My father texted me this morning suggesting that I craft a post about Easters in Connecticut with my mother's family. So, here goes...thanks for the suggestion, Dad.
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As a child, I spent my Easters in New Britain, CT at the estate of my Great Aunt Nelly and Great Uncle Edvardo. I use the word "estate" because their brick house felt huge to me when I was little. Nelly and Ed had no children and utilized a downstairs bedroom for their own, so the entire second floor, consisting of three large bedrooms and a bathroom was akin to an underutilized wing within a English country home in one of my little girl books, resplendent and bourgeois. Excusing myself to wander from room to room, peeking in and snooping around, I can remember re-decorating the well-heeled enclosures in my mind, updating them from their conservative 1950s style to more modern day colors and textures.
But wait, wait, wait - I'm getting ahead of myself here - let's start at the beginning.
Late Easter Sunday morning, my parents and I would take off in our car, en route to New England. We dressed up in a pleasant style back then, me usually in a beribboned hat of some sort which I'd hold on my lap in the car to keep the elastic from pressing uncomfortably against my throat. Upon arrival Dad would park in one of two sprawling cement parking spots in front of a large white 2 car garage. A generously sized, pristine garage was sort of an anomaly, at least in my family, in the 1970s but my Great Uncle had one. The garage held his large vehicle, always an American-made Dodge 4 door sedan, always in a generic shade of blue.
My Great Uncle was a practical man, born in 1920 and nurtured during the depths of the great depression. He eschewed any item or process other than those completely utilitarian in nature. His snow white hair was tinted a more youthful buttery shade with the water from cooked yellow vegetables. Proud to grow and grind his own horseradish root by hand (always outdoors - never EVER inside the house); he'd color it with hot pink beet juice and if we didn't cry tears of pain and snort pitiably from deep in our sinuses due to its pungency on Easter Sunday he considered that year's batch a miserable failure.
Uncle Ed grew rows and rows of organic vegetables which, when we visited in the summer, would be plattered and served naked so that we could taste their earthy goodness. My Dad's (and my) favorite crop was the raspberries, an entire acre of them, which Uncle Ed and Aunt Nelly would pick and freeze. They were mostly used for ice cream, hand churned utilizing salt, ice, a wooden bucket and a steel crank. That homemade ice cream was used for Easter dessert, scooped out aside fancy fruit shaped marzipan candies and a festive basket cake which my mother would make using a round bundt pan and the same faded pastel handle off of an old Easter basket from years gone by.
No one dared buy rainbow Paas tablets for the Easter eggs. Brown eggs, bought from a farm family down the street, were dyed with the skins of two dozen crimson onions, peeled off and saved in a paper bag for weeks prior to Easter. The water was boiled, the skins were thrown in for an hour or so, and then the eggs, a pinch of salt, and a splash of vinegar were added. Upon completion, their hue was one shade lighter than what you might describe as Indian Red, which, not coincidentally, but rather pointedly, has always been my very favorite Crayola crayon.
All of the guests at Easter dinner looked forward to and were delighted by our egg tapping game which we were told, by Aunt Nelly, originated in her mother's native Poland. The rules were simple, whomever won the previous year would hold a hard boiled reddish egg and the person next to him or her would attempt to break it, point to point, without breaking one's own. One egg would break. The other would stand tough. This went 'round and 'round the table until a new winner was crowned. My Nana (sister of my Great Uncle Ed) had a well known knack for tapping and winning, nearly every year. She would then declare that the prize was a long, long life. There may be some divine truth to that as Nana only recently died at the grand age of 95.
I never saw my Great Aunt Nelly in pants. Honest to God, I don't think she owned a pair. Every Easter she handily rolled up and hairpinned her waist length Gibson girl style hair, naturally a shade of deep sooty silver and donned a fancy dress which she smoothed repeatedly beneath her plain white apron, bleached and tied at the waist, until someone noticed it and complimented her. Wearing a smile that was both wide and unsure, she'd begin to tell us where she bought it (always G Fox) and before she could tell the details pertaining to what day it was bought or what she paid for it, my Great Uncle would interrupt, sternly instructing her not to brag. She would wring her hands and stammer, "Oh well, yes, oh well..." before returning to the kitchen to check the meal, recollecting that a once a year dress was a privilege and not something to be flaunting before others. I wished that just once she would have told us the whole story of a new expensive dress, from soup to nuts.
Our dinner fare was traditional - ham, potatoes, green beans, bread, eggs, horseradish, wine. We also had homemade Polish kielbasa which my Nana and Papa would transport and present with great aplomb directly from Schenectady, NY. In preparation for the feast every year, we would gather a week before Easter at their house and work as a family to make it ourselves. This is not the kielbasa found in the grocery store. This is kielbasa made from well marbled boneless pork shoulder, bought at the Avon Meat Market on Van Vranken Avenue, a short distance from my grandparent's home in the Stockade district. My Nana would select the meat along with about 30 feet of hog intestines which she politely referred to as "casings". It was my job as a small child to pull the stomachy guts from the 3 hour old rinse water and cut them with sterile kitchen scissors to just the right length. Then I'd pass a casing to my mother and she would thread it on the spout, extremely careful not to pierce it unintentionally. Whosever's turn it was to crank the grinder would grab a fistful of meat, accented with garlic, marjoram, (no) salt* and pepper, and shove it down mightily into the metal receptacle. Crank, smooth the intestines, gently guide and pull, then slide it off and pass it to Nana to knot when it's full. Grab a new casing and do it all again. I had no idea as a kid that not everyone did this. I thought the whole world made Polish style sausage for Easter.
After dinner, depending on the weather, there was either Anisette, coffee, dessert and gathering time in the living room to hear about Uncle Ed's job at Pratt and Whitney where he made airplane engines or if it were nice out, we'd first wander around the outside of the property, listening to him describe what would be planted in the early Summer, where and when.
The end of the evening was always difficult for Aunt Nelly. She'd scurry about putting glass jars of homemade horseradish into paper lunch bags for all of us. She would hug and hold us, forcing the breath from our lungs in an embrace which felt like love tinged with loneliness and peppered with frenzy. I recognized this sort of embrace within myself years later as a childfree woman who said goodbye to her "adopted for the season" camp kids at the end of every summer, knowing I'd see them again in 8 months and grasping onto them, weighty and breathless in my heart, tying to capture the moment and sustain it until the next time.
Easters in Connecticut stopped when I was a sophomore in high school due to a changing family dynamic that made me less available on holidays. For a while thereafter I enjoyed the newness of simpler Easters with my other grandparents and our family friends. It wasn't until college when my Nana invited me to her apartment for a small and intimate evening of pre-Easter kielbasa making that I felt the hole in the belly twinge of traditions that had been lost, never to be recovered.
Life moves forward and our paths, if we are lucky, move us across and in between the paths of other wonderful people. I have been blessed by 35 additional years of inclusion in others' Easter customs, including my husband's family which introduced me to my very first plastic egg hunt and bodacious decorations like 5 foot tall plywood bunnies on the lawn painted in florescent colors. Hubby and I have tried a few Easters at our house over the years. I think we've done all right.
My Great Aunt passed away in 1993, my Great Uncle in 1997. I Google Earthed their home tonight to look at while I wrote (because I have a mind replete with addresses I very easily recalled it) and was saddened to see that it wasn't quite as palatial as I'd recalled. The grand old garage is still standing. There appear to be no raspberries on the property.
What a shame.
* No Salt was special salt for Papa. You might recall reading about it in my Shelter in Place post here: https://mushroomtumbler.blogspot.com/2020/04/shelter-in-place.html
#1970s #1980s #mushroomtumbler #NewBritain #GFox #PrattandWhitney #polishtraditions #kielbasa
