ten plagues

When I was a boy we always had an elaborate Passover seder at our house, usually with some out-of-town relatives joining us. There is a particular part of the ritual when you recite each of the ten plagues. With each name--boils, locusts, hail, smiting of the first-born--you dip a finger in your glass of wine and put a drop on the plate. The wine looked like blood, red drops against my mother's stark white plates, each drop accompanied by her grim, tremulous intonation of the Hebrew words, each plague marked by a new drop the size of a fingertip. This memory came so vividly to me this morning while I stood, half-awake, making my coffee.