When The Moon Sings - April 26, 2025

Having reached a certain age, and not a very advanced one, people look beyond hollow chocolate bunnies for meaning in the holiday of Easter.  For the devout, the implications are obvious, and the practices prescribed.  For others, Easter may have non-religious but still profound significance.  The practices of the holiday are graceful, the season is gentle, and the chance for reflection is a welcome break from the humdrum that follows the Christmas season.

As I left the house on Easter morning, the sun had warmed the air, a gentle southeast wind blew and the last of the azalea blooms still hung on the bushes.  But there was something else this year too, something that took me back, not to chocolate bunny years, but to post graduate paranoia.

 When I was through with school… well, I’m not sure I was through with school or school was through with me, but we parted on amicable terms.  Anyway, I left school and moved into an apartment that cost next to nothing.  I roomed with a friend who was in a similar position and together, we could afford next to nothing.

The apartment had one amenity in the midst of several features that don’t count as amenities – it sat one block away from a large cathedral.  While not I was especially religious, the cathedral was a magical place for me.  This was an American cathedral, with no great history behind it, but they built it in grand European style – complete with flying buttresses, gargoyles, and oversized stone angels that seemed to question your fitness to be there.  It had a large worship area of course, but it also had several small chapels, some subterranean, which encouraged people to come and contemplate whatever they had to contemplate, away from disapproving stone angels.

Two things distinguish cathedrals.  One is parking, or the lack of it.  Despite a generous lot, the parishioners’ autos often spilled out into the neighborhood, especially for great religious days.  I acquired a job that demanded I be elsewhere for some of those occasions, and sometimes the walk home from available parking was almost as long as if I had simply walked from work.  If you happen to be in the historic district of Savannah during peak worship times, you understand the problem.  We have many churches, usually well attended, and the demand for parked becomes voracious.

All cathedrals worthy of the name come equipped with bells, and this one had been generously supplied.  The bells rang through the day – every fifteen minutes, for the canonical prayer times, and especially for major holidays.  Most Sundays, we’d be treated to a selection of hymns in the afternoon.  For holidays like Christmas, we heard carols without benefit of radio or television or computers.

Sometimes, most times, the dinging and donging became meaningless, either because we were engaged in some pursuit or because we simply blocked out the sound.  But for people in the right mood, the bells became an auditory extension of the cathedral – large, magnificent, and an attraction for being in the area.  They reminded me of the things I loved best about the Cathedral – the chapels, the gargoyles, the seeming ancient garden south of the structure.  On days when demands forbade witnessing those things, the bells were a reminder that they were still there.

Time marches on.  My intended career having been stifled by great events, I started a different one, which involved a living wage.  After a generous handful of months, I moved to the suburbs closer to the career, but away from the sound of the bells.  The only bells in my new neighborhood came from the summer ice cream truck.  The Cathedral retained its magic, and I visited often.  The Cathedral had been built on top of a hill, if not a very steep one, and sometimes the bells seemed to welcome me as I travelled up the hill for a visit.  The distance and lack of sight made the tolling more meaningful.

Then I came to Savannah.  Savannah suited me well and still does.  Savannah even has a fine cathedral of its own, a similarly beautiful building with many of the graces and comforts of the other cathedral.  That includes bells to alert people to clock and canonical hours.  But in cathedrals as well as many other human affairs, first loves die hard, if they die at all.  Among the small handful of things I miss about my old locale, visits to the cathedral sits near the top of the list.  I get to see and hear Savannah’s cathedral every week, but it’s not the same.

This Easter morning, I walked out early – the sun had risen just above the tree line.  The day was as pleasant as anyone could want.  But this year I became more aware of the holiday itself, in terms of the celebrations, both scared and non, that we attach to the holiday.  They seem well paired with soft and warm days – in some more northern places I have lived, Easter was the day that winter officially ended.

 Then I realized why.  The southeast breeze blew through the house wind chimes, which are strategically placed so I hit my head every time I water the lawn – the spigot is right below.  The chimes were ringing without benefit of my head colliding with them.  One of the tubes is a yard long, and the second not much shorter, so there are bass notes in addition to the more common jingle jangle of smaller sets.  The ringing of those larger tubes brought me back through the years to those post-graduate days.

However religious the observant, Easter seems like the holiday of renewal.  Part of that are the particulars of the event we celebrate, and part of it is the season.  The seasonal portion affects us all, whatever the climate.  It might be “the ice is finally breaking up on the lake” for some and for others, like us, it might be “time to see if last year’s shorts still fit.”  That’s cultural rather than religious.  Who among us couldn’t use a little renewal?  Memories and wind chimes stimulated mine.