Mother Nature toyed with us this weekend. She gave us two days of sun then snatched the sun away. Today is another cloudy, dampish day. The temperature will fluctuate between 50° and 39°. Where is spring in all of this?

Dinner was delicious yesterday. I even gave the dogs a taste of ham and a bit of mashed potatoes. They were lucky I shared.

Today will be a sloth day. Yesterday I did some odd chores, infrequent chores. I organized my little library, took down the outside colored Christmas lights and sweatshirt sleeve dusted a few tables. The colored Christmas lights have been burning every night. I’ll miss them, but, as always, the white lights are still on the rail and gate. They brighten the night. They break through the darkness.

Yesterday, I found two pictures of me taken in December 1969 at my house in Ghana. I was twenty-two. In one picture, I am standing outside near my house wearing a Bolga hat and my blue flowered culottes. It is the dry season. The grass is brown all round me, and I can tell the road is sandy. Off in the distance are white buildings with black trim. They are the bathrooms for the middle school just out of the picture. I am smiling. The second picture was taken in a room I don’t recognize. I look so young. I am still smiling broadly. I am wearing a sleeveless sort of house dress and holding a yellow Bic pen with a red cap. A blue aerogram is on the table beside me. I guess I was writing home. I don’t know why I noticed that. I loved finding those pictures.

Today I have another odd chore. I have a few wooden boxes filled with vinyl albums. I am going to go through them to see what I have. They date from the 60’s and 70’s. I know two of them are poets reading their poems. One is Robert Frost and the other is Edna St. Vincent Millay. Two others are drum and bugle corps music. One was recorded at Symphony Hall. I don’t remember about the other. I expect surprises.

The dogs are asleep head to head. My house is quiet. I like it that way.

The sun is bright with a dark blue sky as its backdrop. It is in the high 40’s but feels chillier. Everything is still. Everything is quiet. I have no plans for today. I’ll have my dinner in the early afternoon. It screams tradition, salad, ham, mashed potatoes and green beans, rolls and a chocolate cupcake decorated for Easter.

When I think of Easter, I think of color. After the drab winter, I love the first stirrings of color my garden. The brightest color is always the yellow forsythia. The one in my front garden was a housewarming present over 45 years ago from my brother and his then girlfriend. It has buds. The croci are always the first flowers. Mine, on the side of the front yard, are purple. I think of them as harbingers of spring. My dafs and hyacinths are in bloom. I seem to like purple as all the hyacinths are shades of purple. The dafs are both yellow and white. The garden brings surprises every day.

When I was a kid, I knew what Easter celebrated. The nuns made sure of that. On Good Friday, a day off from school, we had to take turns spending some vigil time, usually about a half hour, in the downstairs of the church during the hours Christ was on the cross. I remember all the statues were covered with purple wraps. It was a time of mourning. Besides the few of us kids forced to be there, only old people were also in the church. They were walking the stations of the cross or sitting in pews praying and saying the rosary. I was far less attentive. It wasn’t easy to sit there. I was a kid who wanted to be anywhere else. That time stretched forever.

We used to leave out carrots for the Easter Bunny. When I was young, I never question a rabbit who carried baskets everywhere and delivered colored eggs. Santa had his reindeer. As far as I knew, the rabbit only had a wheel barrel filled with eggs. I just figured it was magic.

I remember looking through my basket and eating the rabbit’s ears and maybe a jelly bean or two. We had eggs for breakfast. I was too young for the irony. After breakfast, it was time to dress in my new Easter outfit for church. I felt fancy.