Mom Hears the Sounds of Easter
Have a wonderful Easter under a bright blue sky.
Each season has its harbinger. When the Christmas trees go up right in the stores after Labor Day, you know that Christmas is coming. When the newspaper advertisements show pictures of sweet gray-haired ladies peering wonderingly into azalea plants, you know that Mother’s Day is coming.
In past years, a sure sign of Easter at our house was the sound of a rheumatic van wheezing up the steep driveway. Our son Timothy attended college at Western New Mexico University with young men who lived in Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio and Florida, too far to go home but never too far to come to our house in La Habra Heights.
Tim was the kind of a kid who said:
My mother won’t care.
My mother will escort 40 fourth-graders on a train trip to the San Diego Zoo/Olvera Street.
My mother will make six dozen cupcakes with jack-o’-lantern faces.
My mother will decorate for the football banquets, varsity and junior varsity.
It’s OK. She likes to.
And that is why our house was always filled with Midwestern basketball players on every holiday. One must have the senses of a jungle tracker to see them in the open but you get to learn the signs. The sliced ham, potato salad and chips and dips I put out were gone without a trace. There were sleeping bags in the guest rooms and there were towels in layers like moraines on the bathroom floors.
And soon the telephone would begin to ring and the fluting voices of girls were heard. “Tell him Pam (Kimberley, Shelley, Trish, Karen) called.” Either the boys have little signal senders on the tops of their heads that tell the girls they are in town or the boys called the girls days ahead from school charging the calls to their fathers’ phones.
Do not tell me they can’t go home again. Like salmon returning to the rivers of the Northwest, like the swallows to Capistrano, the darlings come back and the sound of clothes swishing down the laundry chute for dear old Mom to put in the washing machine is heard. And for this, thank you, Lord.
My husband, Doug, suggested that it might be time to stop hiding the baskets with the names of each boy on them when he found me filling the baskets with after-shave lotion as well as candy. But I could not bear to think of Easter morning without all of those lumbering darlings crashing from room to room and out in the garden to look for the baskets.
And I noticed that when Doug found his basket with his name on it, he took it upstairs and put it on his dresser. And that was all that was said about outgrowing Easter baskets.
Besides, soon enough the cold air of reality would blow upon their necks, still looking vulnerable and boyish, and they would discover that baskets and colored candies and eggs come dear and seldom. It behooves us to honor the Easter Bunny as long as he hops in. Soon enough, he’s up and down the trail taking with him his gauzy magic and we all need all the gentleness and laughter we can find.
I hope you have good luck with dyeing the eggs. I am always put off when the dye goes inside the shell and I am faced with green and blue hard-boiled eggs which I can’t even disguise in creamed tuna, the last refuge of hard-boiled eggs.
To all of you the finest of Easters, all the eggs found and no chocolate stains.
