Whether you’ve just celebrated
Easter or are currently celebrating Passover, I hope the holiday was and is all
you hoped it would be. Customs vary widely, but all have some common elements.
The largest of these is the inclusion of family and friends.
Whether we approach these
special times traditionally, as our forbearers did, or we add our own modern
twists, it’s the sharing with family and friends that makes these occasions
memorable. And holidays observed without family close by are often spent
recalling those memories made during earlier times.
My granddaughter, who is 14,
asked me about Easter when I was a kid, and what it would have been like for her
dad, our late son. From my childhood there are some traditions that stand out in
my memory more than others. There were the candy baskets, of course, and the
hunt for Easter eggs. In my house, both when I was a child and later, as a
parent of young children, these were actual eggs—hard boiled by us the night
before, and colored, and then “hidden” by the Easter bunny over night.
More than once as a young mom I
had to spend time in the days following Easter Sunday hunting for that one egg
that always seemed to defy being found. I wasn’t anal enough in those days to
make a list of the hiding places.
The other thing I recall as a
child was the whole, “get dressed up and go to Church” ritual that “Easter
Parade” I used to hate. Today, going to Church isn’t the fancy dress occasion it
used to be. I always figured too much emphasis was placed on the outside,
instead of the inside where it belonged. I was raised Anglican (Episcopalian)
and I’m old enough to recall that women and girls didn’t go into the church
without having their heads covered. I never really knew why that was. But Easter
Sunday was an even fussier occasion than normal, and the hats fussier still.
I recall a light pink dress,
and a darker pink coat that was way too thin to be warm, and a hat that I really
didn’t like. I would have been 5 or 6 at the time. Oh, and the white,
for-Church-only shoes with the buckle in the wrong place and that were very
uncomfortable. How could I forget them, or the socks with the itchy lace around
the top? “Don’t scratch!” was an admonition that regularly interrupted the
Easter liturgy when I was a kid.
Even being little, I understood
the spiritual significance of Easter. That has never changed, but it’s the
social rituals, shared with my family, that I look back on and recall so easily,
rituals no longer observed. Right down to the colored eggs brought into the car
with a salt shaker, for a treat to be enjoyed on the way home from services. In
those days it was practically the only time we ate in the car.
This year, we awoke to a lovely
gift from Mother Nature on Easter Sunday—about an inch and a half of snow, where
none had been the night before. It was actually the only kind of snow I like,
because as I looked out my front door, I saw white on the grass and on the
vehicles, but not on the road.
My beloved, when he got up,
looked out the window and then asked, “What month is it again?” Of course, this
is Canada and we can both recall snowfalls as late as early May. I don’t want to
think about that particularly, because I have green shoots breaking ground in my
flower beds.
Soon I’ll have tulips and
daffodils and narcissi, sweet spring blooms to fill the air with their
fragrance. I’m on tenterhooks waiting to see if my lilies-of-the-valley, my
lilacs, and my peonies survived. I’ve been hoping for some sign of life in my
one and only rose bush, planted last year.
I know it’s a bit early for
that in this area, yet.
March came and went nearly
without consequence, not making much of an impression at all. The first week of
April has been an unpredictable mix of cold and mild, and if it wasn’t for the
fact that Easter is behind us, it would be tough to say, for certain, that
spring had indeed arrived.
Not unpredictable is the
reality that time marches on, regardless of our fussing about or the weather, in
a cycle that in many ways resembles a rodent’s wheel.
And spinning ever faster with
each progressive year.
Love,
Morgan
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