Happy Easter!

I'm all dressed up for Easter, looking like a Junior Hit Man. Who would have guessed that they made old man hats in such small sizes? Maybe my mom boiled one of Fred Dowling's fedoras, and hung it on the clothesline to shrink. Note the shed in the background. You may encounter that in an upcoming story.


I really don't have many memories of Easter as a child. I do not remember Easter baskets so much as I remember the first year I did not get one. As I recall, my mother had warned me in advance not to expect one because I was getting too old, but I am chuckling right now at the bitter outrage I felt when I discovered she wasn't kidding. My ire only tripled when I found out that a friend my age got an Easter basket, and I was quick to point this out to my mother. I'm sure she gave an offhand reply such as "How nice for them. Maybe they'll share some candy with you." My mother was always immune to my pouting.


In high school my friends and I decided it would be fun to have an Easter egg hunt. We prevailed upon my mom to hide eggs in our yard. This was a mistake. For one thing, we had a big yard, and it wasn't a blank one like the yards of some of my friends. Our place had been filled out with many more trees and bushes than when the above picture was snapped. There were lots of places to hide eggs, and my mother took her assigned task seriously.


I had to clear out while Mom played Easter Bunny. My friends and I showed up at the appointed time and we began to hunt. It was fun at first. My mom sat in a side yard beneath some shade trees. We'd bring her eggs while she sat in a garden swing, and she'd tell us how many more we had to find. We searched all the likely places several times and there were still hidden eggs. She started giving out clues like "Did you look in the sky?"


In the sky? This was turning into the Egg Hunt From Hell. These were just your run of the mill pastel-dyed eggs, and she hid them cunningly so they would blend into their surroundings. Someone found a green one in the middle of an expanse of lawn. I guess they employed a grid-pattern technique to find it. The one in the sky was tied in the branches of a tree, a blue egg so that when (if) you looked up it matched the blue of the sky. She'd used a stepladder to conceal it.


She finally had to start helping us find them, but by then even she didn't know where all of the remaining ones were. I was still finding rotten colored eggs in mid-summer when I was tending the yard. Some childhood activities just shouldn't be revisited.