As you may know, when people where I grew up (in Georgia) think of Easter, they think of dogwood trees white with flowers, azalea bushes blooming, the fine film of pollen dust coating everything.
But, not in Ohio and not this week.
There is snow on the ground right now (though not much, I grant) and the forecast calls for more light flurries today and into tomorrow. Almost all of the young flowers have wilted, their blooms shriveled. I just hope the trees hold on and don't skip straight ahead to boring green leaves. It would be a shame to have so little time for the beauty of spring blooms.
But, the season must go on, regardless of the weather. (Do you think Jesus wouldn't have resurrected if the wind chill had been below freezing?) Our church had planned an Easter Egg "hunt" (I'll explain the quotation marks in a minute.) yesterday morning for church children and for the community at large. People worked very hard to prepare what seemed to be thousands (I heard someone say 3,000!!) of eggs for enterprising young hunters to find.
We knew that with the temperatures being in the 30s and intermittent snow blowing, the turnout might not reach the preparations, but there were a good number of families and kids there to take part.
Even so, I'm glad that the girls brought their wide-mouth Easter baskets, since they easily gathered over 100 eggs each.
I saw kids filling garbage bags and dragging them around, since they were too heavy to lift. And it wasn't about greed, each kid NEEDED to gather their own weight in eggs or the lawn would still be dotted with the technicolor eggs even today.
The problem, though nothing could be done about it, was that our church building, being little more than two years old, doesn't have a great deal of landscaping as of yet. The grass was just put in within the past year. So, when we turned the corner to drive into the parking lot, it became clear that this wouldn't be so much an Easter Egg Hunt as an Easter Egg Gathering. (It really was like shooting fish in a barrel.)
But everyone had fun anyway.
When we got home we realized that so much candy had been gathered, it was almost clear that the Easter Bunny should skip our house and give his candy to someone else. This didn't stop the girls from preparing their Easter baskets for his arrival, alongside the plate of lettuce and carrots.
But, Sarah did write a note, asking the E.B. to cut back on the candy . . .
So, in the end, everyone has a good weekend and we even managed to squeeze some religion into the entire proceeding.
Happy Easter!
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