The sun arrived late this morning. It brought blue skies but not a lot of warmth. It’s a sweatshirt day. I’ll be out and about for a bit later as I have a long list of errands I’ve been saving for one swoop. I might even take a ride afterwards. It seems like a perfect day to meander.

The neighborhood is abuzz of activity. The warmer weather brings all the snow birds back from sunnier climes. The neighbor who lives behind me is here. Earlier in the week he cut down the huge oak tree which had been there since long before his house was built. For the last three days I’ve heard the hum of his saw as he cuts the pieces down to size. The neighbors beside me are here for the weekend. They are weatherproofing their deck. Across the street, Herb and Joanne are back from Florida where they’ve been since early February. Yesterday I saw Herb out cleaning his yard of winter debris. Soon enough he’ll be mowing his lawn. The quiet of wintertime is gone for now.

Gracie spends more and more of her day outside. She lies in the sun in the back of the yard or on the deck lounge when she’s seeking a bit of creature comfort. I know that feeling and can barely wait until every day is sunny, until every day is warm. The furniture is uncovered, candles are hanging off the tree branches, the debris from winter winds has been cleared off the deck and the storage bins are gone. Everything is ready for deck days and for dinners in the warmth of the evening and the glow of candlelight.

The paper mentioned the soil is 50°, and we are two weeks ahead on the growing cycle. I knew that when I saw my forsythia this morning. It is a glorious yellow, full and beautiful. It was a housewarming present thirty three years ago.

Life used to be so much simpler. This morning I went looking for the USB connection for my camera. It wasn’t in its usual spot, the place where I keep most of the connectors, like the ones for my cell phone and my IPod. While rummaging, I did find three orphan wires which must connect to something or I wouldn’t have saved them. I did find my camera’s wire but I’m still curious about the other three.

When I was little, just about everything connected to outlets on the wall.  A couple of lights and the TV shared an outlet in the living room. My mother had several cords connected in the kitchen. Her Mixmaster, her radio, sometimes the iron and the fry pan were all plugged into a single outlet. They piggybacked. Cameras were one of the few devices with batteries. The first camera I remember had a huge flashbulb screwed into a circle of silver. It was bright enough to light up the room. The shadow of the flash stayed in my eyes for ages, and I remember my father oohing and ahing from the heat of the flashbulb on his fingers as he tried to replace it.

The radio we had wasn’t clunky. It was small and square and had only an am tuner and a volume control knob on the front. The wire came from the back, out of a hard piece of what I think was cardboard with holes for ventilation. It hid the tubes. When portable radios arrived, they were called transistor radios. Now there were two: radios and transistor radios. That way we never got confused. My first transistor was huge by today’s standards, and it still had only two knobs: one for volume and one for am radio. I used to lug mine everywhere. I thought it a marvel.

I got older and the world changed. Transistor radios got smaller, flash bulbs were blue and square with four bulbs in one, Polaroid pictures were born and the TV was in color. I thought those were the  wonder years. Who could ever have suspected today?

The sun just broke through the clouds. It rained a tiny bit last night. I could hear drops hitting the overhang outside the open window in my bedroom as I fell into dreamland.

The morning is a quiet one, as most Sundays are. My neighbors waved and wished me a Happy Easter as I drove by them on my way home from breakfast. They were coming from church and were dressed in their Easter clothes, in light blues and purples and pinks.

Today my friends and I are going out to dinner, and I’ll wear my Sunday best for the occasion. The restaurant is a lovely one right on the water. It isn’t often I go to restaurants without shelled peanuts on the floor. Today is an occasion.

The Red Sox open in a night game against the Yankees tonight, and I have been excited about this first game since the start of spring training. Baseball brings so much along with it. It makes me think of summer and hot dogs and the sounds of the crowd. I can already hear the crack of the bat and see the first ball sailing over the Green Monster. It won’t be long before the announcer says, “”Attention please, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Fenway Park.”

I wish all of you the best Easter if you celebrate and a wonderful Sunday if you don’t. I’ll be heading to the deck after this. I want to feel drowsy from the warmth of the sun. The lounge chair is all ready.

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.

The sky is ablaze with sun. It is glorious today, and I’m heading outside after this. I’m going to uncover the deck furniture. I would love a band and some music for the unveiling.

I ran into a former student the other day who had graduated about twenty years ago. We hugged and chatted. She told me I hadn’t changed a bit. All I could think of was I must have looked much older when I was younger.

We never had school on Good Friday. It was considered a sacred day so we got to stay home. I really never cared all that much about the sacred part. I was just a kid and cared more about having the day off. We never had an Easter countdown like we did for Christmas so being giddy and impatient was never part of the weekend. My friends and I would ride bikes and play around the neighborhood like it was any other day. Easter Saturday was just about the same as every other Saturday. We’d have hot dogs, beans and brown bread for dinner, watch a little TV then take our baths. My sisters would cry when my mother combed the snarls out of their wet hair, and my brother and I would turn up the TV so we didn’t have to listen. It’s not that we found the sound heart-wrenching. It was annoying, just as my little sisters were.

My mother was always a bit busier that Saturday. She’d take off tags and iron any wrinkles in our new clothes then set them out, ready for the morning. After we were in bed, she’d go to her hiding place and bring out the baskets and the stuff to put inside then put them together. We never heard her. Falling to sleep the night before Easter was never a big deal.

The war with the squirrels has taken a new turn. I am feeding them, but there is, of course, a catch. The feeder has three arms like the sails of a windmill, and the corn is attached to the end of each arm. The squirrels become the Flying Sciuridaes (which is the family squirrel. I looked it up). I watched a squirrel spinning this morning. I couldn’t stop laughing at the beastie’s antics. He was, of course, as all squirrels are, quite persistent. He finally decided to eat upside down.

The day is cloudy again. They keep promising sun, but that hasn’t happened yet. At least it’s dry. My yard is strewn with limbs which have fallen this winter. Scrub pine branches are delicate things.

My sister is planning an Easter egg hunt for her grandson. She’ll be hiding colorful plastic eggs filled with small toys and candy in her backyard. It reminds me of one special Easter egg hunt when I was kid. It was for the whole neighborhood and was in the field behind our houses, the same field where we hunted grasshoppers and fireflies all summer. The old tree with the fallen limb was the furthest we needed to hunt. We all grabbed our pails or baskets and ran as fast as we could. We figured fleet of foot was the deciding advantage. Each find was announced by a kid holding up an egg and yelling, “I got one.” That spurred the rest of us. I filled my basket. One of the eggs I’d found was gold, and it turned out to be the grand egg, the prize egg. I don’t remember what I won. I just remember that special egg.

I remember one other hunt. It was inside the house. In those days we hunted hard boiled eggs we’d colored on Saturday. My parents would hide the eggs early in the morning and we’d hunt right after breakfast. One year my parents must have lost count. It took a while to find the source of the smell.