Poem for Wednesday, Cats, Farm, Kids

Pesach in Blacksburg
By Erika Meitner

is ushered in by the neighborhood Easter egg
hunt, my kids scrambling beneath backyard
playsets for chocolate, by the ads I’ve been
seeing on Facebook for weeks for the Messianic

Jews welcoming Yeshua at the local Holiday Inn—
is matzo that comes in giant bulk multi-packs
of six stacked on an end-cap shelf at the Kroger
though each of the few Jewish families in town

only needs a single box or maybe two and someone
(a stockboy?) has hung a neat row of Fried Pork Skins
nestled against the Manischewitz Matzo Ball Soup Mix,
the Kedem sparkling grape juice and gefilte fish slabs

suspended in glass jars. Pesach in Blacksburg is a
complication, an exile, and we are the small but
holy remnant so we open the door during Seder
for Elijah the Prophet to find a neighbor selling

magazine subscriptions for a Young Life fundraiser.
We welcome the stranger but I’m sure this is not
what the Haggadah meant when it says Let all
who are hungry come and eat, and this year

again we defrost the shankbone Jenny left
before she moved to Baltimore, and this year
the kids wear plague masks I ordered from
amazon.com (hail, lice, locusts, boils, fire,

and a few others, though I still find the closed
eyes on the Slaying of the First Born unbearable)
and this year again only some of us know the songs
but we sing them over and over: Dayenu, if He had

supplied our needs in the desert for forty years
it would have been enough—and the kids eke out
a weak Four Questions with the help of the adults
then ransack the house for the afikomen. This is a

shadow of the seders of my youth, the lace table
cloths, my survivor grandfather in his resplendent
satin robe at the table’s head leading, switching
between Hebrew and Yiddish, but we do what

we can, so I string together folding tables in the
dining room and guests roll in with wine and extra
chairs and here is the bread of affliction, of far-
from-home, of galut, that we eat and eat and eat.

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I had a very busy but good Tuesday, starting with torturing the cats at the vet while the professional landscapers were trimming the bushes and power-washing the deck, plus taking a bunch of photos of things to offer on Buy Nothing and putting other things out for AmVets and recycling. Then we drove to Manassas to pick up packing boxes, and since we were down that way, we went to Frying Pan Farm Park, which I knew had lambs, piglets, and a day-old baby goat. I even got to bottle-feed one of the older babies! 

After visiting all the baby animals and stopping at Starbucks for lattes, we drove to Dulles to pick up older son and his girlfriend, who flew in from Seattle for Passover and some sightseeing in DC. We took them to Not Your Average Joe's for dinner and drinks, after which we drove into Washington to drop them off at their hotel. Then we came home, packed up some more stuff for AmVets, and rewatched a bunch of episodes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier because I've been in the mood and it's even better on second viewing.