This Easter I’ll be walking on eggs. Trying not to crack.

I usually go crazy at Easter. I have an entire Easter closet full of really queer stuff — like painted bunnies pulling giant egg carriages holding little chicks — that I use to decorate the lunch table. It is not my fault. When I was five, my mother gave me an Easter dinner party and blew out eggs so that she could fill them with layers of wax in Easter egg pastels to make little ombred egg votive candles. I still have a photo of my friends and me in our Easter finery, like grown people, out on the terrace at these candlelit tables. My basket on Easter morning was always filled with chocolates of course, but also little Herend China eggs and one egg she painted with real gilt. Then we’d hunt eggs and go to church and my grandmother would make the only thing I think she ever made in her life, a cake in the shape of a bunny, covered in coconut, with jelly beans for its eyes and nose, and we’d all have lunch.

Anyway, I love the trappings — the lilies and the eggs and the bunnies. I will make my husband John a basket (and probably one for the dog, too) and then we’ll go to church with the rest of the Easter heathens and listen to our amazing choir with the horns they bring in for the day. I usually do a big lunch with a pork rib roast or a leg of lamb. But this year one of my closest friends in the world, M.T., is having lunch at her house in Covington, Louisiana, across Lake Pontchartrain.

A few years ago, John and I fixed her up with her husband, a judge, and miraculously they got married and she moved from New York (where we used to be neighbors). It was the first time I have ever successfully fixed up anyone in my life, but it was meant to be. M.T.’s father and my father have been best friends and business partners for 52 years and we have always lived in the same place. We are also long-time cooking buddies, but this year she is not even letting me help her, for which I am grateful. She is doing deviled eggs and ham biscuits to pass around, and then baby lamb chops on the grill, and this fabulous new potato salad she does with coarse salt and lots of garlic and mint, and a green bean salad with balsamic vinegar and lots of grated gruyere that we have both been making for more than twenty years. Her brother and his wife, both of whom I’ve known since they were born, will be there; and their children will hunt eggs and we will drink wine and watch them. And then we’ll toast to how lucky we are to be together and to have such lovely continuity.