What the Hay, It's Passover!

This week spring has finally arrived. Although we had intermittent snow and nights were still below zero, we had a few sunny days which melted the snow considerably. I actually saw the first daffodils, looking a bit sorry on a cold morning, on campus at Vanier college up in a raised box. The ground temperature has not quite hit daffodil level. Along with the first hint of renewal in the garden came an outburst of student activism. My university students at UQAM voted to strike starting last week in protest of government austerity budgets, and this week Vanier students voted a one-day strike, which fell on a day I did not have classes. My stage students continued as usual, because unlike UQAM, Vanier has a much less radical student body and the strike was limited strictly to boycotting classes on campus. I was secretly grateful to UQAM for their choice of timing for their bi-annual strike (it seems to be happening every semester the past few years), because I was getting nervous about how I was going to manage preparing for Passover. With a student strike, I still get paid to work even if no one shows up in class, and as such I need to present myself as usual in my classroom on the off chance 50% or more of my students turn up and expect me to teach. They never do, so after a noble 15 minute cameo I am relieved of my duties and free to go home, and engage in an age old ritual of eliminating every speck of leavened substances (along with good old fashioned grime and dirt) to prepare for the ancient and nerve-wracking holiday of Passover.
This is the socio-political background to my week. On an environmental level, Passover, as an early spring holiday, coincides with early indoor planting time. In addition to cleaning the kitchen and obvious places where bread and grain products hide in my house (such as under my children's mattresses, you really don't want to know what I find there!), our workshop-laundry room needs to be reorganized to accommodate my seedlings which I dream of planting early but never do. Also, I had yet to locate a source of hay. Our friend Claude the agronomist was putting out some feelers for us, but I was ready to give up on it and anticipating a long summer of weeding and feeding the old fashioned way.

I mentioned being concerned about surviving preparation for Passover. The usual way in which I manage is to save up vacation time and take off a couple of weeks at Passover, usually half of it before for preparation, and the rest for during the holiday. My daughters are still in high school and as it is a Jewish school, they get off the week of Passover. By the time I have scrubbed my kitchen with a toothbrush and cleaned out the nooks and crannies of the dishwasher with a q-tip (that was a new trick I tried this year), prepared and run a seder for  20 odd people, I usually need a week to recover. This year I am teaching full time for the first time ever. There is no such thing as taking a two week vacation two-thirds of the way through the semester. Fortunately, the religious days of Passover fall mostly on the weekends, and Easter gave me the day before Passover off, but that was all. I discussed with Nancy my cleaning lady about moving into my house for the week, until Josh was surreptitiously laid off (temporarily between contracts) 9 days before Passover. Nancy agreed to two days hard labour, and Josh promised me not to worry, he'd take care of everything.

The best laid plans being what they are, this week was somewhat less than smooth and predictable. Last week both of my daughters were in the school play, which requires 100 hours of rehearsal time in the last week before the shows, 4 productions, a late night out to the Orange Julep following the last show and an all-night cast party the weekend after. I am grateful that the teachers are a bit flexible on deadlines to the kids in the show, but with only four school days until Passover after the extravaganza, the week before Passover was a bit extreme in catch up for the girls. And of course, Zara had a project for human biology, to make a model of the circulatory system using household items. Josh being an electrician and collector of all things esoteric and weird, "household items" can be very broad, and school projects are a particular interest of his. Why do something simple when you have LED light strips, a wood shop, paint, a heart shaped fridge magnet... except if you don't actually have the LED lights strips but an old school friend had a business...I also mentioned that since Josh did not manage to finish oiling and varnishing the remaining doors to the kitchen cabinets that he promised to have finished by this Passover, at least can he put up a light fixture above the sink, especially if he is going to Dan's  to get lights for Zara's project? Can you see where this is going? My dreams of coming home to a perfectly clean kitchen (with fantastic lighting), to be able to have a glass of wine, kick my feet up and relax before the big weekend seemed to be disappearing in a  haze of sawdust. Which would have to be cleaned up, too.

A cousin of Josh's and her husband decided to come up to Montreal and visit over the holidays, and took me up on my emphatic offer for them to stay at our place next time they visit from New York. I informed my son that he would be bumped out of his room and would need to clean it for our guests. When he turned 16, nearly three years ago, I told him he was responsible to clean his own room. It did not happen much. Josh offered to give him a hand. Six hours later, the room looks fantastic. That was just in time for Zara to get home from school and ask Josh for help making her project. Four hours later, Josh emerged from the basement finally to find me working at cleaning the stove and wishing they made self-cleaning gas stoves. Back in the fall, Josh bought a carload of apples which we had to turn into pies and cakes to freeze before they all went bad. Some of the apple pies dripped and left a big puddle of fruit leather at the bottom of the over. It was midterms and I did not have time to address the issue which continued to smoke and set off the smoke detector for a week or two every time we used the oven, but after that it settled in and became part of the scenery. Literally. By the time I went after it this week, it had become something between a polymer and a lacquer which did not come off without a chisel. I paid a price for my earlier neglect. The oven alone took something like 5 hours to clean, maybe more (Josh finished off the bits at the back where I could not reach).

With Josh being home, and having Nancy for a couple of days we hoped to finish our cleaning early and be ready to start cooking in advance, which we have never managed to accomplish before. Alas, life got in the way and it was not to be. On Tuesday, as I was cleaning the oven (still), Nancy contacted us to tell us she had slipped and fallen and was on her back, and not coming the next day. Then a surprise call from our friend Jack, he managed to locate hay and could deliver it. Was Thursday okay? He could not find bales, so it was a huge roll, and we would need a lever to get it off the truck, would we be home? I experience a huge inner conflict. The Jewish mother in me in screaming, the day before the seder and I have a huge roll of hay as big as my dining room on my lawn, wow what a conversation piece, ohmygawd yet another thing to fit into the day on Thursday, crap I will be working Thursday!! The gardener in me, (luckily the outer voice too) says GREAT!! I am so happy! Bring it on! We will figure it out! Despite Josh managing to get the workshop clean, organized and ready for me to plant my seeds, it does not look likely at this point that I will have time to plant before the seders are over.

Wednesday is my longest work day, as I have office hours and a class at Vanier then hop the metro downtown to UQAM to teach a night course. Fortunately my night course is on strike this week, so after a respectable but brief visit to my empty classroom, I did one more installment of Passover shopping and arrive home around 8 pm. While I was working and shopping, Josh was cleaning the fridge so I could put the Passover purchases directly in the newly cleaned fridge. We do a big purging at Passover, getting rid of anything that looks sketchy, or that no one has eaten in 6 months. It can get a bit nostalgic at times, but usually is just gross. In the process of cleaning the fridge, Josh noted that the plastic frame that holds up the big bottom shelf and the two drawers underneath was cracked in seven places. Being Mr. Handy-man, by the time I got home, he had glued it back together and painted it so it looked almost normal, but it needed to dry. All the windows were open, and the contents of the fridge were on the table. I spent some time putting things in boxes and bags and stacking them on the bottom of the fridge. More delays but at least the fridge and stove were clean. And good news, Nancy thinks she may be up to coming tomorrow.

By Thursday morning after Josh drove the girls to school transporting the project (can't take that on the bus), I was frantically trying to be useful before running off to work, and decided to clean the big glass shelf before reassembling the fridge with the newly glued frame. I had the shelf balanced on the sink as I started scrubbing with a sponge on some sticky gunk along the edge, and the thing exploded in my hands into a thousand tiny shards which spray all over the kitchen including into the open cabinet where I had carefully spent a couple of hours packing in all of my non-Passover pots, pans and containers, into the cabinets which I had just scrubbed clean to put all my Passover dishes, pots and pans. If I was not already short on time I would have just sat and cried, but we soldiered on and Josh was looking up numbers to find replacement parts. I wasted more than an hour finding the place to learn that oops they did not have it in stock and can order the part it will be ready in a week or two. We have 18 people coming to our seder, and we are cooking a bunch of things for my cousin's seder on the first night. This was not looking good. Josh had a big sheet of plexiglass which he got for free somewhere sometime and was saving for something which is now uneasily resting on a glued together plastic base (they did not have the replacement part for that in stock either, I checked) after he cut it down to the right size, leaving a spray of plexiglass shards all over  the workshop to be dealt with later.

I come home from work for lunch. My intention was to have enough time to do some more prep work but the time spent running around looking for replacement parts cut into my available time. I had initially hoped to be ready to unpack my Passover dishes (remember the dream of coming home to a clean kitchen) but instead Josh was just getting to putting up the light fixture he promised me to finish. Nancy had spent most of the morning removing glass shards from every pot and pan I own and was just getting started on what I had hoped would be finished the previous day. Did I mention I am EXTREMELY grateful to Nancy for helping us through the worst Passover cleaning disaster I have ever had? While in pain and when she should have been on her back? And Josh who should have been ragging on me for creating so much extra work, but only said that he was so happy it was me and not him, because if the shelf broke in his hands he would never hear the end of it, and who did not complain once, not ONCE, while installing lights and chiselling ovens and doing last minute school projects (well, he did complain a bit to Zara for her lack of organization and crappy timing). I came back at the end of the day to find that the light was up, the glass was mostly cleaned up, my son Isaac had helped Josh maneuver the hay into the back yard, and Nancy was vacuuming. The vacuum was making strange noises and a smell of burned rubber which I have experienced before. It means stop vacuuming and get to a repair shop (I needed this today). I called my mom to borrow hers and asked Josh to give Nancy a ride the the bus (she looked like walking for 20 minutes was not a good move) and pick up mom's vacuum.



Finally got the kitchen finished and all ready at midnight, so today we can start to cook. All that to say, we have hay, but I have not yet planted my seeds. Happy Passover!

P.S. Just went out to photograph the hay, and found hyacinths sprouting!! The periwinkle is green, and there are branches of the ash tree all over the back, but life if returning. Happy spring.