We spent our Easter in a rather nontraditional way this year. On Sunday morning we armed ourselves with rakes, saws and axes, and drove to our summerhouse up in the Northern Estonia. We have a little old cottage there in the middle of woods. The thing is that no-one has had neither time nor energy to go there since mum got sick last August and it's not hard to imagine what such a long break does to a garden - it looked more like a thicket than a garden. So we spent two days there, fingers in the soil, fighting the curse of thorns and thistles.

And it gave me time to think about all kinds of stuff.

I thought about Easter. Just a few weeks ago I read a book where the author was wondering why on earth would Mary confuse Jesus for a gardener on that epic Easter Sunday morning. You know, it's not very likely that gardeners back in the day walked around with bright white spotless robes and shiny faces. So maybe Jesus looked a little different compared to how we usually picture him in this scene. Maybe Mary mistook him for a gardener because he looked, I don't know, messier than we think, maybe she thought He was a gardener because on that early hour he still got dirt under his fingernails. Dirt of his tomb, dirt of mankind.

As I was thinking about it, working hard in my own garden, with some literal dirt and some not so literal dirt under my fingernails, I liked that idea very much. It made me like Jesus even more (although I didn't think it was possible for me to like him more than I already did). And it made me like Easter even more.

Χριστός ἀνέστη. Αληθώς ἀνέστη.