It Was Eggsactly Like This

I was one of those girly little girls who absolutely loved the business of dressing up for Easter. I would always have a painfully frilly dress and lace trimmed socks--the whole thing. Even a purse, although I seem to recall having nothing to put in it except a wad of Kleenex that my mother gave me, and which I could be relied up on not to use, preferring instead to sniff loudly in church until she gave me a look that said clearly "My daughter is so very cute and it will pain me to have to kill her when we get home". I usually wore two slips because the one that I deemed suitably "pretty" itched as if it were made of little wads of duct tape that plucked at my skin while I moved and the soft cotton one I wore under it was not, in my wordly 3-year-old view, quite grand enough for such an occasion as Easter. Sometimes I had panties with ruffles on them, which seemed odd to me even then, seeing as how my mother spent as much time admonishing me to "sit like a lady" and "keep your dress down!" as she did plotting ways to murder me for the sniffing thing. I am told that I referred to these panties as "classy assies", and that my mother never EVER said such a thing within my earshot so she can't imagine WHERE I picked it up. Perhaps I channeled it from herthoughts about what parts of me were going to have a sharp meeting with the hairbrush when we got home from church. It is possible that I tried my mother (particularly when I flushed the hairbrush down the toilet....but that's another story).

Then again, my mother also performed the unspeakable cruelty of placing in my Easter basket one year, on a nest of improbably pink, shiny grass, a chocolate egg so huge that it might have come from within a chocolate ostrich--a monster of an egg with flowers and my name on it in frosting. Why cruel, you say? Because when I took a bite I discovered that the treasured goodie was, in fact, about 7/8 of a millimeter of chocolate (not the good stuff, either--it was rather reminscent in flavor of a melted, dark brown crayon, and don't ask me how I know what that tastes like), scraped over a mound of maple-flavored fondant that suddenly seemed even larger and more imposing now that it was not a thing I wanted to eat. I seem to recall finding that bitten egg about a year later, not rotted at all but certainly hiding well among my rock collection, many of which were quite a bit softer than it was by then.

I seem to remember getting Peeps, too, which I loved but not because they tasted like anything other than slightly gritty styrofoam packing peanuts. Rather, I loved them because I could play with them as if they were festive play-doh, assuring more malevolent looks from my mother when she looked down at me in the pew and noted the grimy wad of marshmallow and chemicals in my hand, some of it inevitably stuck to my dress, the hymnal, my purse, or all three.

Fun as those times were (we'll use the term "fun" somewhat loosely here, given my tendency to inspire something close to infanticide), Mr. K and I opted for a different sort of Easter experience today--specifically, we worked on his resume together until he was about to swat me for the annoying, persistant little bee that I can be, and I was about to shove him from the chair for moving at the speed of a senescent snail with an old football injury. We have slightly different work styles. We did get quite a lot done, though. Once we were both adopting variations on my mother's "children would be best served hot over noodles" look, we decided to take a break and go for a walk on the same path I went on recently. We even took some new photos. This first one isn't sharp, but I love the silvery, liquid look of the leaves (which is Ms. Kspeak for "I screwed this up but maybe they'll think it's an artistic thing..."):


Something about these little purple flowers appealed to me, and not just because they weren't perched on top of a maple flavored, crayon-coated rock:

This is one of those idyllic pictures that we Seattlites use to taunt tourists who inevitably manage to show up in the pouring rain...as in "really, it was just LOVELY yesterday..."

We had these kind of woods at our house when I was a kid at Diamond Lake, and I played in them endlessly during the summer. My mother assures me that she wasn't REALLY hoping a forest troll would come take me off her hands.

We ran into one other couple on our walk, and they let me walk right up to them without turning a hair...er...feather.

May your Easter be a good one, may all your eggs be filled with chocolate truffle, and my all your chocolate bunnies be solid.