SPRING

We hugged hours-old lambs last week and buried our noses in their sweet smelling curly hair. Lambs crying for their mothers make the open air markets noisy places right now. Most of these jumping babies won't live through the month of April because they will have become Easter dinner.

Our wanting to participate in everything here means we celebrate two Easters. The first with our Hungarian Unitarian, Lutheran and Roman Catholic friends and later with our Romanian Orthodox and Greco Catholic friends. Last year the two Easters were only a week apart, but this year, they are separated by a month. Our Orthodox friends explained that the Jewish Passover date is used to set their Easter, and the others count full moons after Christmas.

In the village where we spent Easter, we saw freshly cut pine trees with colored streamers tied to the gates of homes where women of marriageable age lived and pine boughs tied where other women were. During Sunday night, a group from the Reformed Church had placed the greenery on all the gates (for a fee) as part of a fund-raising project to get heat and water in their church. (As an aside here, after the fall harvest, dried ears of corn are hung under the eaves facing the road where eligible daughters live. Some houses have many rows of corn hanging from corner to corner to show they are wealthy people.)

Easter has always meant Spring and Renewal to me, and now I understand why eggs represent this--the hens are starting to lay again. They give enough eggs for eating and hatching with plenty left over for decorating. My job in the decorating process was rubbing the dyed eggs with a piece of oily pig skin to keep them shiny. In the middle of March, a friend told me she was pleased that three of her hens were laying again. I asked her how she know there were three. She showed me three complete different looking eggs and said that each hen's eggs are peculiar to her. Of course now, she must learn exactly which hens are laying and which ones aren't. Guess who will become dinner!?

Even though it's not the Easter Bunny who brings eggs, eggs are certainly part of the tradition here. Easter Sunday is the day for church and family, but Monday is the time for calling on friends and giving eggs. Men and boys go from house to house, repeat a poem or special greeting they have composed and spray the women and girls with perfume to represent "watering the delicate flowers in spring." They are given cakes and wine (or other home brew) and a decorated egg as they leave.

When we first heard about how the day is spent, we thought it sounded like a wonderful loving, gentle tradition. And it is. But quite a few men were drunk by the end of the day, and the women were coughing from having so much perfume sprayed on their hair and clothes! The original custom was that a young man sprinkled water on the head of his favorite young woman. We heard that as a joke sometimes a bucketful of water was thrown. The custom has evolved to spraying all female persons, young and old, with perfume.

All over the neighborhood, men are outside beating rugs which they have hung on the poles placed nearby for just this purpose. At first we thought it was gun shots (we're from an American inner city, you know), but we have become accustomed to this audible part of the feverish cleaning ritual which occurs before each Easter and Christmas. Walls washed, windows polished, rugs beaten, great quantities of food prepared. A friend was extremely concerned last Easter because she hadn't washed her windows yet and would be severely criticized by her mother-in-law. This is serious--she finally stayed up all night doing it!

Springtime in Transylvania is the time when all the yards are cleaned, the out-buildings repaired, animals born, and of course gardens and fields are planted. Thrifty friends advised me to let some flowers and vegetables go to seed last year to have free seeds for this year. I got into the spirit of this and saved seeds from some especially nice tomatoes and peppers I purchased in the market, and I pilfered some flower seeds from cemeteries we visited in Maramures in September. This kind of savings seems insignificant, but in Romania right now with the increase in all prices, saving a thousand lei here and a thousand lei there means a loaf of bread and that's important.

I've looked inside the plastic greenhouses which have appeared in yards everywhere. The first lettuce and spinach are almost ready to eat. Some of my seeds have been started in wonderful topsoil in a friend's raised bed which is about one meter above ground level and covered with plastic. She admitted the other day that this bed stays warm because there is manure from a neighbor's barn under the topsoil and under the manure is what they cleaned out of their own outhouse. We also hear that trenches are dug along the grapevines, and outhouse "stuff" is dug in there, too. So that's what they do with it! Information better not known perhaps.

This is our second spring in Romania, and we will know where to find the first forest flowers. We eat tender nettle leaves before they get big and scratchy. We will appreciate wild strawberries and sweet cherries more because we haven't had any since last June. We can't get milk from our neighbors right now because both of their cows are pregnant and almost due. The storks are back from Africa!!! We like living closer to the land, to the cycle of nature, and feeling its influence.