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Passover H AMY MOTLAGH In the market, no gift is suitable for your parents. The waxen green limbs of the lilies bend outward, beseeching, but they are not the thing that’s wanted. At dinner, two holidays collide in my stomach and I feel it as bitter herb and egg and brisket swim together, uncertain of how to be digested with the candied fruit of buns crossed in icing. On the contrary, you are a quick study for Easter, ready to sacrifice your diet to its hollow chocolate hares and the buttercream eggs my mother remembers to mail ahead of time, frosted with pastel petals in a California confectionery then hardened for travel. She and I know how far I am from egg hunt and Sunday brunch and the small gold cross that hung from my fervent adolescent neck, and that in the same season in which we would fast together, abstaining sometimes from meat, sometimes from sugar, I now make-believe in another observance, closing my mouth against the leavened bread and candy bunnies Jesus died, then rose, to free me for. The lilies lift their heads as I pass, gripping your arm in the doorway of the second-night Seder. PASSOVER 105 ...

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