This morning I got up and boiled eggs—the eggs that will be eaten, not eggs like those above, which are some of the ones I decorated in years past. I also made an eggy and creamy concoction called Pascha which is actually our name for the feastday itself—Easter. In Greek, the word Pascha means Passover. As a convert, I have adopted the food and folk customs of Russian Orthodoxy which I was only dimly aware of as a child growing up. One of my mother’s sisters still made these types of foods, but I only ate them a couple of times that I can remember. The Orthodox Easter was usually on a different day from the Easter in the Western world.

In any case, our Roman Catholic Easter was spent with my Italian relatives because my father’s mother, the matriarch, had a big celebration, and attendance was mandatory. One of the things she would cook was something we called “Easter stew” which was a lamb dish with scrambled eggs in it. It was delicious. The liquid in this stew was thin, but very tasty—perfect for dipping thick chunks of Itlalian bread.

Now most of my Italian family is gone and I see my cousins only rarely. A few years ago, I began to investigate my Slavic roots, and as a result I joined the Orthodox church. I also learned about some of the folk customs from the part of the world from which my mother’s family emigrated (now, it’s part of Ukraine; then, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). I taught myself to decorate the eggs that were made in that region, which is called Transcarpathia and never really was its own country. When we asked our mother what nationality we were, she told us that her mother had said we were “Russian hillbillies.” We have also been called, among other things, Carpathian Russian, Rusyn, Ruthenian, and sometimes “Little Russians.” A film called Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors shows what life was like in that part of the world in the 19th century. People prayed before every task, sang as they worked in the fields, and were extremely superstitious. Life was hard.