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Picnic in a Cemetery

How I spend my Mother's Day

By D. D BartholomewPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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Each year in the Russian Orthodox Church on the Sunday after Pascha we go to the cemetery to bless graves and this year was no exception. The only difference was that this year was also Mother’s Day.

It all started quite normally this morning. I got up, showered and went to church. The service was the same as usual with a slightly smaller choir singing the responses. So far, everything was as expected.

After the service, I had about an hour and a half to kill until I had to be at the cemetery, which was only about a ten-minute drive away. So, I and the priest piled into the car and headed towards the local diner only to be confronted with a line about 20-deep outside of the door waiting to get in. We’d forgotten it was Mother’s Day. So, we headed in the opposite direction back to the local bagel café and had breakfast there; it was empty and had plenty of parking.

We were still very early, but since we’d both brought reading materials with us (I always carry my Kindle) we headed to the cemetery to wait. Once inside the gate we found a sunny spot near the side of the road and sat in the peace and quiet.

Soon others began showing up, so we abandoned our reading materials and began preparation for a memorial service. I walked around to the other side of the car and held the incense burner, which was suspended on three chains, while the priest lit the charcoal and poured on the incense. Soon a thick cloud of white smoke enveloped us.

This particular cemetery is very hilly and it can be difficult to walk from one section to another, so after the memorial service near the entrance and the chanting of the many (many) names of deceased people buried from our church, we blessed a few graves here and there as requested by those present, then got back in the car to drive up the hill.

So far, it had been a normal Sunday after Pascha.

In the car, the censer was still burning, and the smoke was still pouring out of it. Even with the windows open we were both coughing our lungs out. Finally, I yelled, “Stick that thing out of the window and hold it!”

The priest's arm shot out of the car, the chain from the top of the censer in hand and the censer bowl flapping in the breeze, clouds of white smoke trailing backward. Yet, for some reason it still seemed to be blowing into the car and now there was so much smoke it looked like the car was on fire.

Pulling into the parking area at the top of the hill, I immediately jerked open the door, practically falling out of the car desperate to breathe fresh air and to let some of the smoke out.

Upon looking up I saw a crowd of people I didn’t recognize standing around a grave. Not so unusual in a cemetery, but next to them was a small picnic table laden with food. Of course, there were plates, plastic cups. Then I noticed the obligatory large bottles of vodka and wine. Oh, there was also one small container of lemonade.

After blessing a few more graves in the area, the priest and I were grabbed by the arm, ushered over to the table, pushed into chairs and handed plates filled with rice pilaf – but no utensil. After sitting for a while wondering how I was going to eat rice pilaf with no spoon or fork (even chopsticks would have worked) I was handed a tiny, bamboo skewer like you’d use to pick up cheese cubes. I wasn’t sure what they expected me to do with it, but it did have a fancy curly end on it, so I tried my best to pick up rice with that. No luck, so I knew I had to resort to fingers.

By the time I finished eating the rice, there were about fifteen more people sitting in this area by the table, half of them well on their way to drunkenness. It was turning into a party. Then a ham was brought out, plopped onto a plate, along with cheese, bread, grapes and of course, more vodka.

Okay, I thought, I can make a sandwich. But nooooo - there were only three slices of thinly sliced pieces of bread to share between the fifteen people, so I ate the ham and cheese with my fingers; it was the only way to go. I mentally made a note to myself that eating ham and cheese with my fingers was much easier than eating rice with a skewer. You never know, it might come up in conversation one day.

So, that is how I spent my Sunday afternoon. Truth be told, it was a lot of fun, even though my companions were total strangers. I’ve never seen them before and will probably never see them again.

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About the Creator

D. D Bartholomew

D.D. Bartholomew is retired from the Metropolitan Opera in NYC and a published romance author. Her books are set in the opera world, often with a mafia twist. She studies iaido (samurai sword) at a small school on Long Island.

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