I make a silent toast to the things that I do and don't miss

Even before my grandfather died in 2011, I had become the person who led our family seders, because I was the most fluent with the Hebrew and with the stories. I use a mix of books and my own memory. I have none of my books here because we are always at my parents' house for Pesach. (When my grandmother was alive, we were always at my grandparents' house in Maine.) I was already upset because of the disruption of traditions and especially upset tonight at the thought of having to cobble something together off the internet, which felt makeshift and impersonal. Then I remembered that three years ago, my parents had given me and my brother copies of a number of files from my grandfather's computer, printed out as keepsakes on nice paper—family history in letters, stories, the family version of the Haggadah he put together in our childhood and revised into its final form in my adolescence. I had just seen the folder when I was cleaning up my office. I found the printout inside of my grandfather's Haggadah, entitled "Pesach 1995." And then I started crying because it was not like being with either my parents or my grandparents but it was from them both. "In celebrating Pesach," my grandfather wrote, "we are following a tradition that started about 5,000 years ago. A tradition is a way of doing something or celebrating something in more-or-less the same way, time after time." This is an especially more-or-less year, but it's still the tradition. May we all come through to the next time.

Raise the roof and raise the roses

I would truly have preferred the question to remain theoretical, but it is useful for me to know that I can organize a ritual meal out of a household that hasn't seen the inside of a grocery store in two weeks, because while I shopped for the apocalypse last month, I didn't shop for Pesach. (I bought an enormous box of matzah and figured I would go back for the produce and nope.)

We had a chicken in the freezer. We roasted it with dried rosemary and smoked paprika and one of the last lemons. We had chicken stock frozen. We defrosted it and simmered kneydlakh in it. spatch hard-boiled half a dozen eggs; I made charoses out of dates, prunes, and apricots with spices and orange juice and honey because our apples were sketchy and we had neither walnuts nor Manischewitz in any case. Our jar of gefilte fish unopened last year was good till 2023. The part of the lamb bone was played by a sacrificial ginger root and our karpas this year was dill. (We keep horseradish on hand all year round because we're not barbarians.) I read from my grandfather's printout Haggadah. We lit candles in tinfoil and one of them consumed itself almost instantly in a tablecloth-hardening puddle of wax; I am thinking of it as Azazel. Autolycus and Hestia petitioned for a more inclusive seder and were permitted to help in the finding of the afikomen. I went down through our airlocks with a nitrile glove on to open the door to the stranger with matzah and wine: let all who are hungry come and eat, let all who are thirsty come and drink, let all who are enslaved be free, and this year I added to the blue evening air and the kerchief-masked passerby who walked quickly on the other side of the street, let them all be healthy, let all who need protection be safe. I put wine on our doorposts in lieu of blood. Next year in company, I am seeing people wish one another, next year in freedom, next year in health. May we all see it.