Celebrating Spring

Between the spring rainstorms, the sun shines as bright as a floodlight. Spring light limns the masses of petals on the flowering trees, creating technicolor explosions in each yard around the neighborhood.

The night before Easter, a rainstorm beat out a loud staccato pattern on the skylights and drenched the backyard. It brought the Easter bunny inside, where he hid chocolate bunnies and chicks wrapped in foil, lollipops and gummy bunnies and Tic Tacs, and coin- and seed-filled plastic eggs.

Only three children--a teenager, a middle schooler, and a preschooler--hunted for the treasures. The difference in ages melted away as they tried to beat each other to the treats. One handmade fabric basket, made by Amber of Shagbark Studio (more baskets for year-round storage fun available here), groaned with Easter booty.

By mid-morning, after an enormous Easter breakfast, Mrs. Easter Bunny had a minor meltdown and went to nap in a quiet patch of clover.

She remembered Easter pasts with her brother and sister and many cousins dashing around her aunt's yard. Cascarones, confetti-filled eggs, and brightly dyed boiled eggs filled their baskets. Cousins cracked the cascarones over each other's head, releasing the colorful confetti. The tiny paper circles and crooked rectangles--punched and cut from construction paper, tissue, and the funny pages in the newspaper--were carried on the breeze, snagging in the scraggly patches of grass and littering the yard for weeks afterward.

Later, as she mixed the cream cheese batter for a simple lemony cheese cake, Mrs. Easter Bunny remembered an Easter cupcake from childhood. A dozen of them in fact, carried in a plastic carton. Dyed green coconut covered the white frosting; jelly beans nestled in the faux grass.  

It was Aunt Rosie who brought those cupcakes. Aunt Rosie, with her styled auburn hair and impeccable makeup and burgundy lipstick and elegant pantsuit, carried the cupcakes from the car parked in the dirt driveway behind a line of other cars, both hands supporting the bottom of the supermarket carton. A gaggle of cousins surrounded her to ogle the delightful treats, and she greeted them in her feminine, breathy voice. She walked in a cloud of Dep styling gel, Aqua Net hair spray, and spicy perfume.

She carefully maneuvered through the crowd of children and climbed the concrete steps to Aunt Elma's house, opened the screen door, and then gracefully balanced the carton with one hand as she held out a palm to keep the screen door from banging shut.

A dwindling crowd of acolytes followed her into the steamy kitchen, where Aunt Elma was busy mixing a big batch of potato salad. Aunt Rosie put the cupcakes on the table in the storeroom, with the other cakes and cookies: homemade carrot cake, Italian cream cake, Mexican wedding cookies. The children admired how the little landscape of the cupcake jelly beans turned into Easter eggs and coconut became grass, like the thin Communion wafers become the Body of Christ during Mass, except cute and colorful and probably yummy.

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As Mrs. Easter Bunny dried the fourth dishrack of Easter dishes, she wondered what memories of spring celebrations past you see reflected in spring's bright light.