It’s early evening on Easter Monday and the sky is blue and the sun is shining. I have a Don King hairdo, and I don’t care because it’s a day off work and I’m in a laid-back kind of attitude that feels good.
Hard to believe sometimes how quickly life events, including the weather, can spin 360 degrees. Easter morning, I woke up early to search for treats from the Easter Bunny but I didn’t believe I’d find any because he couldn’t get in my driveway for the snow that had piled up overnight. When I look outside now it’s like the snowstorm never happened at all.
No sooner had my great right toe touched the floor when Earl the Duke from Here was meowing outside the bedroom door because I had been out of sight all night.
When I ventured out of my sleeping den, there he was stretched out like a ruler in the middle of the kitchen floor pretending he had not just howled for my attention. But on this, his very first Easter morning he also had a small foil wrapped egg in his front paws.
Suddenly I panicked. What was I going to find next? Had Earl pounced on Peter Rabbit at 2 a.m., stripping the bunny master of his treats and his fur, leaving it all strewn about the living room? Thankfully no. Earl had only begun to tear the foil wrapper on the small egg. It looked like it was still under the five-second rule so I picked it from his paws, finished peeling it, and ate it myself.
As a confession, last week some of the big Cadbury eggs I’d bought for the egg hunt didn’t even make it into the kitchen cupboard for safe keeping. I ate all 10 of them.
Earl, the smartest cat I have ever known, leapt from his prone position and rang the brass goat bell that hangs on my kitchen door to the porch, sat back on his haunches, stared at me with those piercing blue eyes and waited for me to open the door and let him out. I taught him how to ring the bell in about a half hour when he was four months old. Next up is teaching him how to open the door himself and that’s sure to be another story.
My grandchildren are veteran teenagers and yet are still enthusiastic participants each Easter in my neck of the woods, where the farmyard (and yes even this year in the snow) becomes a puzzle to be solved as they search for the egg loot and the possibility that some may contain cash, compliments of my G-man.
And I love, love, love finding the egg outside that the grandkids and the pesky squirrel did not! I usually discover it sometime during the summer when I’m cutting grass or trimming. The long-lost plastic egg contains what should resemble chocolate having morphed in heated weather into an unrecognizable item, but I eat it anyway. After all, chocolate makes you live longer, right?
Meanwhile, evidence that there were more than a dozen of us here on Easter Sunday for a midday meal is most apparent today when I open my fridge and slices of ham on a bun and devilled eggs try to make a run for it with a side of coleslaw and wild rice casserole. Strangely, though, the homemade lemon bars and brownies mysteriously disappeared sometime after midnight last night when someone got up for a pee break.
I’ve kept a diary nearly every year since I was about 11 years old. “Way back then,” the diaries came with a lock and key and Lord knows I kept them locked for fear my dear brother Jay would read them and find out I didn’t like hockey or something.
I decided to check my history books today to see what happened at Easter in 1972 (April 2). To quote my lead penciled writings, “I found 11 easter eggs and Jay found eight. Then we went to church and I got to wear my new boots.” I remember those boots. They were white-zippered Gogos. I thought I was so cool and I wore them often that summer.
In 1975 on Easter Sunday (April 10) I wrote, “Weather is in the 80s again!” (26C) “I got a pretty near too much sunburn this afternoon and don’t need my electric blanket to generate heat ‘cause my burnt body does.”
I’ll bet you that if big Cadbury eggs were a thing back then I would have eaten 10 to help soothe my skin.
