Pysanky Love by Donna H. DiCello

Photo by Czesława Grabowska via Unsplash

Words have a complex beauty: conjurers of magic, they roll off the tongue, they elicit our emotions, serve as bridges between both personal and collective history. Pysanky is one of those words to me, even though it is not of my native tongue. It is Ukrainian, and derives from the verb pysaty, which means “to write.” In a lyrical linguistic maneuver, pysanky is intertwined with and describes the art of Ukrainian egg design done at Easter time, with the “writing” completed on the eggs wordlessly, with wax and dye. Sofika Zielyk, a Ukrainian-American ethnographer and artist whose connection to pysanky dates to childhood, explains that pysanky began to be “written” as a pre-Christian ritual to welcome the return of the sun after the long winter (eggs as symbol of rebirth, an appropriate connotation for Easter). As the tenets of Christianity spread, the symbolism on pysanky adapted to include more religious images, alongside the swirls, ribbons, crosshatches, angles, and florals of the previous era, each of which has meaning. According to some sources, pysanky were used as coded communications during war time, decipherable only to those who understood pysanky’s nuance. The legend also goes that as long as pysanky are being written in the world, goodness will ultimately prevail. To see a pysanka (the singular form) is to behold a world of color, symbolism, and the story of a strong, vibrant, and resilient people. The patterns are complex, dizzying, meaningful; the stories, inferred.

Women are the holders of this art, a matrilineal legacy passed from one generation to the next. When I was a child, my Polish mother recounted how her mother practiced this art when my mother was young. She explained how my grandmother would melt beeswax in preparation for the ritual; then, dipping a straight pin into the melted wax, she would trace intricate designs on eggs that had been emptied of their contents through a small hole in the end. After crafting the design, the dyeing process would begin, a separate sequential bath for each chosen color. The wax would then be gently smoothed off at the end by heating the egg in a candle flame, revealing the evolved design. Despite the obvious tenderness in my mother’s voice as she recounted this, she had never learned how to write pysanky. My mother was close to her mother, so the absence of instruction confused me. Was my mother not interested? Were there stories my mother could not tell? 

I think of my early years with my mother. The times I heard her speak Polish were times of wonder – it was the only other-than-English language spoken in our home, my father having long forgotten his Italian mother-tongue. English paled against the foreign words of my mother’s weekly Sunday deliberations when she called one of her sisters, the cadence of all the Zs, Ws, Cs and Ys dancing through the house, carried with laughter and long conversation that made my mother laugh, and then cry when she hung up the phone, the connection to the language she loved severed. She taught me some simple phrases (Kocham cię – “I love you” and SϮodkie jak cukier – “Sweet as sugar”, and simple terms of endearment for each other, -“Dobra córka (“good daughter”)” and my reply, “Święty matka (“holy mother”). Speaking in her native tongue made me feel worldly and special, though I could not hold a candle to my aunts; they spoke their native language as silver-tongued as my mother. 

When I was a teenager, my mother asked me if I would be interested in taking a pysanky class with her, as one was being held at our local community center. As a budding feminist I was very interested in fostering our mother-daughter bond – it was the time of the women’s movement – and wanted to bridge the internal conflicts our relationship wrought in me. I was acutely aware of my mother’s complicated stance on my independence from her, was aware of the low hum of her pull to be taken care of by me, and how I bristled against that. So in the spirit of working this through, I told her that it sounded like fun and meant it. 

What happened in the interim? We never did take the class, and the reason is now long ago lost to me. Was it time, or something else? When I was only six years old, I vividly remember the sadness my mother felt when her mother died, the night before my birthday. I recall tentatively watching her from the kitchen as she sat in her bedroom crying, her face crumpled, the long threads of connection with her mother becoming chimera. Perhaps her pysanky would have been written with a pain she could not bear to evoke again, unaware that its expression might heal the wound. So much of my mother remained mysterious to me – her nervousness, the way I would catch her twisting her wedding band when I could sense some internal pressure was pressing on her. “You were always her favorite”, she told me when my grandmother died. It was then that I first learned what it meant to feel helpless.

In 2022, the world of pysanky exploded on the internet as Orthodox Easter approached. A war raged in Ukraine, and Ukrainian women began to write. Sunflowers for the national flower, blue and yellow for the Ukrainian flag. Goodness must prevail, the subtext for every swirling pattern. What might it mean to tell a story without words, for me who has turned to words her whole life? Is this what resistance looks like – hope in the dark – as Rebecca Solnit writes?  Words are not the only harbingers of story. 

Photo – the hands of a group of ten women, arms outstretched and meeting in the middle, each cradling a pysanka. My heart cracked over that image, a fine but ragged line, like an egg that has been boiled too long. From the crack a memory emerges – my mother and I dancing around the living room, the strains of an energetic polka filling our house, bridging my teenage defiance and filling her with a sense of home, both of us laughing when our steps became out of sync, a fumbled but unfeigned choreography. 

Thirty years later, a crack of sharp January light through the hospital room window illuminates that my mother is dying and I am holding her, my arms folded underneath her like wings. What they say is true, how in that liminal space between life and death, memories flood back like a swelling river. Out of all the regrets I could have had about our relationship, even in spite of the many satisfactions, I thought of the never-taken pysanky class. As my mother’s spirit began to fade, she began to speak Polish to me: “Dobra córka” she whispered, and I replied with my usual refrain, “Święty matka.” It was fitting that our last words to each other were in her mother tongue, her connection to family, and life, and love.

As the Ukrainian war raged into yet another year I again began to think about pysanky, as I viewed the countless images erupting on social media for another season. I imagine that the Ukrainian women did not expect to be writing for another Easter. I thought about the class that I had never taken with my mother. I began to search for a local class, and found one at a nearby Ukrainian church. This season, I would learn to write without words, and connect myself to the ancestors that passed this art to my grandmother, to heal the lost opportunity with my own mother, to connect with a sense of hope in the dark.

It was a warmer-than-usual Sunday afternoon in March when I walked into the sprawling church hall, finding abundant Ukrainian flags and women bustling about, hearing the lilt of a language that sounded familiar yet different. Supplies were gathered – the eggs, the candles, the kistka (the implement used for applying the wax), a sheet containing the meaning of the symbols, the pencil for sketching out the design on the egg. First, the sketching: even with a soft pencil, it felt awkward and clumsy, tracing designs on an ovoid shape, trying not to crack an egg still filled with yolk and albumen. I chose three designs to start: the ladder, which symbolizes “prayer”; dots, to symbolize tears or stars; meandering lines which symbolize “eternity.” I did not choose these consciously; they seemed easy for a beginner, and it was only later that I realized what I was writing – a prayer of lamentation, and of hope.

I stumbled with my kistka and drawing the lines, causing wax blobs to form where thin lines should have been. I burnt my fingers on hot wax and forgot the color succession of dyes, so I had yellow where I wanted red. As heads were bent over candle flames and instruction sheets, the instructor read a history of pysanky, of how this art was passed from mother to daughter, and I thought of my mother and all that I didn’t know about her life, and all of the ways that I missed her. When I came to the final stage of rubbing the wax off the egg after holding it in the candle flame, the design strikingly emerged and I saw that my egg was perfectly imperfect – rudimentary in design and color, yet full of loving intention. Inept though I was, I had finally written what I had set out to do so many years ago. 

I do not have a daughter to whom I can pass on this art. If I venture to do it again, my pysanka writing will be clumsy for a long time, and I will always prefer the more fluid folk designs that predated Christianity. And yet somehow a loop felt completed – with the burning wax, the imperfect design, the blackened fingers. 

I gently think of my mother, and our pysanky never created together – yes, Matka, the writing can heal the wound.

Donna H. DiCello is retired from full-time practice as a psychologist and has been writing since she can remember, having always loved the shape, sound, and meaning of words. She has had poems and essays published with Blue Heron Review, Voices, and Minerva Rising Press, among others, and was a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee for poetry. Along with her co-author, Lorraine Mangione, she has had a non-fiction release with New Harbinger/Impact Publishers, Inc. titled Daughters, Dads, and the Path through Grief: Tales from Italian America. Donna is currently working on a poetic text about her retirement, which incorporates images from the non-human world.