Easter Eggs From Far Away

When I think about Easter, I think about eggs and daffodils and chocolate and new shoes. Sometimes I remember having to go to Sunday School the week before Easter and coming home with a couple of palm fronds that my sister and I always tucked behind the top of the old, drop-front, oak desk behind the front door. The palm fronds stayed there for months until they collected dust, and my mother threw them away.

I never understood the significance of the palms (certainly an incongruous element in the old house on Main Street), but they were different, and there for the taking, and it was something, at least, that I got from Sunday School.

Easter also meant a big chocolate rabbit from Uncle Barney and baskets fluffed with neon pink, green, or yellow Easter “grass” and filled with jellybeans, a chocolate egg or two, and a few marshmallow baby chicks. The night before Easter, we would dip hard-boiled eggs in old cups spilling over with boiling water and a vinegar/tablet combination that magically turned the shells a washy blue or pink or yellow.

Easter morning, we donned our new saddle shoes and perhaps a new coat and went back again to Sunday School, and that afternoon, to Aunt Florence’s for dinner. Her house was always sparkling clean and fresh and smelled good…like baked ham and paper and refinement and roses and order. Our house smelled like bacon fat and old, chipped woodwork and linoleum and pipe tobacco and a smidgen of hardship.

At Aunt Florence’s, we wore our new shoes and sat up straight and didn’t say much. We were quietly transported, reading the poetry and looking at the gleaming photographs of spring flowers in her Ideals magazine, which had a strong religious bent, though we focused on the daffodils and forsythia and tulips. And at dinner with fresh flowers in the middle of the table and heavy silverware and candles in the daylight and blue and white plates from Denmark, I felt as if I was in another country, a country of elegance and sophistication and education and mannerly deportment.

I knew at Aunt Florence’s on Easter Sunday a way of life that got all mixed up with new shoes and a glossy magazine and the fragrance of baked ham and the heft of sterling flatware. When we got home that night, my sister and I wrangled over who was going to bite the head off Uncle Barney’s rabbit. It was a school night and everything was ordinary and weary and plain again. I put Aunt Florence and her house in an exquisite egg wrapped in the tissue of memory and sealed with a handwritten, foreign address.