I’m afraid I’m losing the scent of Easter.
Over the years I would occasionally—on off days—mornings usually, come across the scent, and I would blurt out, “It smells like Easter.” And my kids and husband would wonder what I was talking about, and would ask me. I would try to describe it, but it was never satisfactory, and they never quite understood.
Easter fragrance is the scent that flows over the land after a rain. The smell of fresh green grass. Ozone maybe, although ozone doesn’t smell as fresh as Easter. I can’t say, except that I know it when I smell it. The scent became stuck in my nostrils before I was six years old. It came one morning when I was hunting for Easter eggs. We lived in Illinois then, and I remember that morning…
I’m afraid I’m losing it.
One Easter, before that six years old milepost, I got three baby chickens—one colored purple, one pink and one green. They never do that anymore—color the chickens, although I don’t believe it hurt them for they grew into white chickens and pretty soon I could tell them for the rest of the flock. I tried to make pets out of them, but chickens as pets are never satisfactory. Another Easter I got a bunny, a real bunny, and my mother’s boyfriend, the one who became my step-father, built a rabbit hutch for it.
Easter came last Sunday--which caused this contemplation. We went to brunch at a local winery down the hill from where we live. There they had a petting Zoo that Baby Darling adored, especially the Blue-tongued Skink. A couple of Christmases ago we found a Christmas turtle large as a man-hole cover, (The Hawaiian Hawk-billed sea turtle). This year it was an Easter Skink (lizard, about a foot and a half long)—impressive to a three-year old. The rest of us gravitated to the baby pigs. They had a micro mini pig, too, that would not get much bigger than Peaches, our poodle—fatter though. The baby pigs would squeal to high heaven when caught, but then settle down and snuggle into someone’s arms. Elderly Mrs. Wilson, wife of the husband and wife owners, walked around greeting people with a tiny pig on a leash.
In the past we have housed on our property, horses, goats, chickens, ducks, and Daughter Darling had ferrets for 22 years. Now, we have none of those—dogs and cats, that’s it. So we go to a petting zoo and see the animals like city folk instead of country folk as we have previously been. Baby Darling saw bunnies, and a burro and goats, and a turkey—who displayed his beautiful tail plumage the entire time we were there, and pigs, and his favorite, the blue-tongued skink—that is the lizard being held in the pictures.
As we leave Baby Darling tells us repeatedly that he never told the lady (who ran the petting zoo) his story. (He has one for every occasion—probably the one he would tell is about the Jungle River Cruise at Disneyland, or maybe it would be about Captain Jack Sparrow, or Alice in Wonderland, or Peter Pan and Captain Hook, or his new favorite “Splash Mountain,” a Disneyland ride he has never taken, but he imagines it and falls down a pretend waterfall, and can sing “Zippity do Da,” all the way through. (That is the the celebratory song at the end of the ride that tells you you survived, and BD has heard it from the train.)
I wonder about Easter…
As I was growing up it was an Easter egg hunt in the morning, and getting a little sugar egg that you could look inside and see a scene and I never ate it for I wanted the scene more than the candy, and the chocolate egg with my name inscribed was never eaten either.
I was born Catholic, so we went to Church on Easter Sunday, but we went to church every Sunday, so that was no big deal. Later I became protestant, and sometimes there was Sunrise service, which, in Oregon, we dressed in new clothes and went to the service and froze our butts off.
I remember new clothes for Easter, and how it felt to have everything new from the underwear to the shoes and socks and the dress, and how fresh it felt. And I wanted to start that tradition in my family so we bought new clothes this year—like fresh flowers, but we didn’t go to church. I don’t know where to put my beliefs.
What is Easter for you?
Is it the resurrection of Jesus?
Is it the symbolism of the Christ—the enlightened one, being an eternal being of which there is no death?
Is it one of the great high holidays—a tradition, like Christmas, that has been celebrated before we used the initials B.C. and A.D.?
Is it a way to get together and have the children hunt colored eggs? Or is it the tradition of coloring the eggs? How the bunny got to laying eggs is beyond me, or maybe he only delivers them, the chicken lays them. They are symbolic of fertility, and representative of a fertile time of the year when everything is reborn.
So I wish you a time of re-birth, and of a flowering of the spirit, and of knowing you are an eternal being, and for the children to have fun—like petting a blue-tongued skink.
This one will listen to his story.
These won't.
