First of all, may I tell you that after all that snow yesterday, the sun came out and melted it all? We went to bed looking forward to more spring, which we thought would come bounding back today. Ummm. At three o’clock in the morning, making my water-closet run, I thought the light in the sky was very odd. And so it was—another storm, unexpected—had settled on the valley and dumped about four more inches of snow on us. The lovely cheery tree in our neighbors’ house across the street couldn’t handle the weight of both blossoms and snow and pretty much pulled it’s legs out of the earth and lay down. The arena was a 65 x 110ft sea of standing water and muck. The horses were mad. And I wanted to stay in bed. Ah well.
Please – I took no pictures of all this, but Misty did – gorgeous, wonderful pictures of her own arena of choice and trees and the rest of it, including a few free shots of her manly man and Oregon: go and see. Very nice stuff.
And now, finally, I want to talk about Easter. I really love the holidays – Valentine’s, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas – and the 4th of July (but only till ten at night), which cannot properly be called a holiday. But they’re only good if you do them up right, which we seem to not to have done since the kids took flight. My Easter stuff hasn’t seen the light of day for a couple of years now. Cool little stuff, too. Sad.
Now, understand that I’m talking about the pagan part of the weekend; the holy part is too powerful for me to look at straight on, and something I would only “celebrate” by holding very still and gripping my heart—the most momentous event in history, in my belief. So while I am solemn in my spiritual celebration, I also love the joy that comes with the new life part, the re-awakening of life, the stirring again of color and health and baby things. Bunnies, eggs, even that obnoxious Easter grass—all symbols of hope, when you get down to it. Hope that no matter how brutal the world may try to be, Life will out – that after what seems like death, real life goes on, and goes on joyfully.
Black was always Cam’s color of choice.
And I love egg hunts. My mother was a practical woman. She latched on early to the concept of plastic eggs. Very early. My first actual memory of finding eggs was actually the year that we didn’t. Mom had gotten religion—LDS religion—and was determined we weren’t going to trivialize the spiritual things. I mean, I guess that’s what she was thinking. She still made Kev and me matching spring lavender plaid dresses for church. And we even wore white shoes and white hats and little white gloves. Which was cool.
Gin, with her mother’s sense of direction.
But when we got up, thrilled to find baskets, there weren’t any. I was maybe six then? She hadn’t warned us. Cold turkey on Easter eggs. Which was just not right at all. So I did what I had to do: pitched a fit. Effectively enough, there was whispering between my mother, who was dressed for church, and my father, who was dressed for yard work, having not yet got religion and comfortable in his cynicism (which is GOOD, Daddy. Really. You should never jump into anything till you’ve turned it inside out). So when we got home from church, there were eggs peeking out from under the elephant ears in the front yard and the sunflowers in the back. Plastic eggs. Which, we found as we filled our baskets with them, were absolutely empty. The fact that this was so shocking to me pretty much guarantees that we were used to finding FULL eggs. It would not be the first time I had to make a point with my mother about the importance of keeping up traditions she had started in the first place.
Okay, maybe Ginna started the black thing.
The smell and texture of Easter for me will always be – okay, this is really absurd – circus peanuts (the marshmallow kind). I guess because mom stuffed eggs with them. I remember when I was really, really little – like three – sitting in the hall of our tiny house in Kansas City, eating circus peanuts and playing with a little wind up Disney Pluto walking toy I’d gotten in my basket, waiting for Uncle Don to get out of the bathroom (which also became a family tradition – the Uncle Don part).
I loved to make egg things. Like these: (the pink egg rabbits)
The idea came out of a Family Circle, I think, and I made a bunch of them for my eighth birthday party, all colors. Some chickens, some rabbits. And while it really ticked me off that some of the girls were not that charmed and ended up smashing theirs (I wanted to punch them – all those careful hours of work), I LOVED those “favors,” and have loved the whole “favor” concept ever since.
And eggs like this:
First, carefully blown out. Then, like a ship in a bottle, filled with a tiny diorama. Finally sealed with cellophane via candle flame. This one, made probably by Ginna (and pretty miraculously saved for the last twenty years)[actually, it was the Chaz], wasn’t quite finished. I trimmed the plastic so it made a neat little window, then I glued thin braid around the hole. Made a bunch of them in sixth grade. Then Mike broke ‘em all. Thanks, Mike. Your baby over-alls were probably unsnapped at the time. They were ALWAYS unsnapped.
Then the Ukrainian eggs. Oy. I never made one. I just drew and colored on my eggs,
but Mer, my neighbor and Megs’ mom, made them, and gave me this one.
And I bought this one (below). (At least, I think I bought it at the 4th of July fair. But Mer may have made that one, too.)
Way beyond my skill and patience.
When I was a kid, I used to always hear about these fabulous Egg hunts in parks or put on by cities or churches or whatever—thousands of eggs, and all the kids invited. And I always wanted to go, they sounded so great. Finally, one time we did go. And it was like, “Ready – set- go – oh, wow – all the eggs are FOUND!” Which should have put me on my guard about a lot of things in life-to-come, but somehow didn’t.
But I grew up with this plan in my mind that someday, I was going to make a fabulous egg hunt for my own kids and some other kids – a dream hunt. And that’s just what I ended up doing.
Every year for more than a decade, the Bills, our friends down the street, joined up with us, and we hid HUNDREDS of eggs, stuffed to the gills with all kinds of cool candy and little things and sometimes money. There was a special medium sized egg for each kid. And there was the Big Egg (which my mom had made at some point, a Leggs Egg plastered with magazine pictures) which somehow managed to escape being found till last of all, every single year. The Big Egg had things like See’s big truffle eggs and paper money in it. And the only way anybody ever found it was to figure out my super obscure hints.
The kids, all bunched up in neutral territory at the beginning, were set loose all at once and raced around the yard – all almost two thirds of an acre of it – hunting first by sight, then by guile. I never let G cut the grass before the hunt, so sometimes it was really deep. Free range, out-in-the-open eggs for the tiny guys. Tough to find, in-the-branches-of-the-plum-trees and down-pipes-and-tree-stump eggs for the canny kids. We never found them all. Every year, we’d turn up two or three in July or August. But when we thought they were all found (sometimes I made a map – always I made a count – all to no avail), we’d sit around on the grass and dump out the baskets (which pretty early on became recycled plastic grocery bags, double layered) and dig out the goods.
It was really fun. Just the way I’d imagined it would be. And the grown-ups, who always got to eat treats out of a bag or carton as the hunt went on, also got to steal treats from the baskets when nobody was looking. This, we always did on Saturday. And almost always outside. Just once or twice did we have to do the hunt in my house. I really only remember one year, the year Megs found the Big Egg in the tin lantern – last of all.
And that was the kick-off of spring for me. I suppose I’m kind of glad not to have had to stuff a hundred and a half and some eggs for the past couple of years. But I’m thinking maybes about the future. If our grandkids are ever in the same place at the same time. Which would be nice. And if not, maybe—if I stop feeling like I’m carrying all the sands of Araby in my head—I’ll just rent some kids for the occasion one year.
Kids, civilized, waiting for the starter gun.
This year would have been one of the inside ones, rainy and gooey. So maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t have a hunt. I’d probably have ended up finding eggs for the next six months, the way things are stacked on chairs and tables around here just now. And we’d probably lose a couple of kids on the way, too.
I guess this is the way I’ll end this: happy pink and yellow and light blue and spring green and rabbits, and lambies, and chicks. They are as inevitable in this world as weariness and worry are, and about a thousand times more attractive. I hope you find ten thousand bright plastic eggs, and when you open them up, find delights and tiny surprises that will carry you though the year—every year. And every time you find one, remember where the light comes from—and that it never runs out.
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