The day is already absolutely beautiful with a deep blue, cloudless sky and a warm sun. Fern, the cat, and Gracie, the dog, are jockeying for spots in the sun by the front door. Their fur is hot to the touch.

I don’t have near the memories at Easter as I do for Christmas. Clothes never made a big impression on me except for that one dress I mentioned in an earlier posting. I do remember being little and wearing white gloves. They made me feel grown up and elegant. My first pair of nylons was worn on Easter and trying to attach them to a garter belt took a bit of manual dexterity and some body twisting. My first few attempts resulted in the elastic swinging back to whack me. Those little metal clips left marks. Another vivid Easter memory is the grass in my basket. It hid the jelly beans so you got a surprise later on and it stuck to everything: rugs, clothes and partially eaten candy. We used to have pick off the stuck spears of grass before we could eat the rest of the earless bunny.

Peeps have long been a favorite of mine, the yellow best of all. Just call me a traditionalist. I also like them stale and hard. My mother used to open the packages and leave the Peeps to the air. My jaws ached eating them. We used to get colored hard Easter candy eggs. They had a white middle, and I don’t think they had much taste. The jelly beans were big and all the colors tasted the same.  I think they were just basket fillers. I know they were the last things I ate after I rummaged through the grass and found a few. Sometimes I’d get a panorama egg, the ones made of icing with the scene inside. I used to save those. One year I remember a woven Chinese finger puzzle. It sticks in my memory because I couldn’t get my fingers freed no matter how much I pulled so I panicked. Come to find out pulling was why I was stuck. New crayons were always a basket hit as was the coloring book. I remember being artistic when I colored the eggs in my new book. I’d draw squiggly lines of different colors and then shade the eggs, a trick I learned from my mother, the best colorer I knew.

All morning long we’d carry our baskets from room to room and nibble on the candy until my mother made us stop to save room for dinner. It proved to me that adults just didn’t understand the priorities in life so we’d nibble anyway when she wasn’t looking. Turkey or ham couldn’t hold a candle to a chocolate bunny.

This entry was posted on April 3, 2010 at 10:39 am and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.