Easter Thoughts

Its a beautiful sunny Easter day here in Maryland. Our cats are rolling around in the sun rays coming through the windows. The temperature is up to 50 degrees and the wind is in a good direction that will allow us (me and the cats) to sit outside for awhile and soak up vitamin D.

This is the first year that my family hasn't had an Easter egg hunt, and that is kind of sad. However, I'm sure that the young members will find some goodies in baskets that the "bunny" has left.

When Super 8 movies were in fashion, I recorded egg hunts that we always had when we lived in Randallstown, Maryland. The night before Easter, the "bunny" would hide about 100 eggs that she and her helper spent hours hard-boiling and painting. This usually lasted until about 3 am, and naturally the kids would be up around 7 am and bugging us to let them look for eggs.

I have three wonderful kids (now grown of course). Diane was an expert at finding eggs. She would methodically look and find eggs. She always found most of them. Elizabeth followed her around and got the few that Diane missed. Chris just lazily looked around and was satisfied if he found just a few. After the hunt, the girls would go into their Easter dance... they did dance steps that "Buck and Bubbles" would have liked to have learned. And I recorded it all on Super 8 movie film.

Sometimes the children's great Aunt Marjorie would come down from Massachusetts for Easter. She adored my children and would bring them all kinds of special Easter eggs. Some were even mechanical. I think that I wrote a blog about the hundreds of fuzzy bunnies that I bought at an auction in Gamber, Maryland. Marjorie took some home with her and decorated them with beads and bangles and would bring them back for Easter. Once, she even made one for me... fancy colored beads and ribbons.. this was the "mother bunny". I wanted to bring that to Social Security as part of my "bunny ploy", but the plan fell through when the bunnies began to disappear. (read my blog)

Aunt Marjorie was a favorite person to me and my family. She as well as my Grandparents brought me up and I'm sure she considered me as her child. I loved her as I did my mother and grandparents and I don't remember if I ever said "I love you" to her.. but perhaps my deeds conveyed it.

Once, when I was very young (7?) my Aunt Laurana gave me an old-style record that I could play on our wind-up Victrola. (This was long before 78's, 45's, discs, and CD's.) It was called "The Laughing Record".. and that is all that was on it... laughing.. laughing .. laughing.. over and over... I played it all the time. I loved that record. (I noticed that Aunt Marjorie seemed to get grumpy after I had played it for an hour or so.)

One day, I came home from school and looked for my record because I wanted to play it for a while before supper. I found it on the rocking chair, broken in half! Aunt Marjorie said that she hadn't seen it and had sat on it. I went ballistic! This was my favorite thing in the world. It took me a long time to forgive her.

Thirty years later, when my family had settled in Randallstown, a package arrived from Aunt Marjorie. It was a gift for me, a beautiful silver Christmas Tree ornament. Since we had already put up our Christmas Tree, we made room for the special ornament. That night, as we were sleeping at 2 am, we began to hear some laughter coming from the front room. Armed with a heavy book, I tiptoed out of the bedroom to protect my family. Nobody was there, but coming from the tree and Marjorie's ornament was laughter, over and over. It took a while to find the tiny shut-off button. (This had to be Marjorie's way of saying: "I'm sorry about the record, but listen to this ornament and understand my side of the story."

Easter moments with Aunt Marjorie were captured on film, as well as our Christmas adventures. I tried to splice all of this film together to make it easier to show. Over the years the family lost interest because of the effort that was needed to set up a screen, the projector and all those rolls of film. However, at one time a new employee of mine asked if I had film that he could put on a Beta tape. I brought him a bag of spliced, unspliced, unraveled, bent, inked, chewed by a cat, etc... super 8 film. He salvaged a bunch of it and dubbed appropriate music for each scene and gave me a "family treasure." We had hours of fun running the tape over and over on Sunday nights.

However, Beta went away. Somebody retaped it on VCR tape. It lost something in translation, but it is still viewed.. in fact, Elizabeth took it home to view last week.

In one of the many boxes of "stuff" that I didn't want to throw away in our last move, is a pile of that Super 8 film.. all mixed up and intertwined. I'm hoping that somebody in the family will volunteer to sort it all out and do a re-tape using modern methods. I don't want to lose the record of those wonderful holiday times.

PS. My Baltimore friend, Lee, says that when he was young all of the kids would play "crack eggs" on Easter. He says this is a German custom. I have never heard of it before and I can't figure out the rules or reason for it from what he says. I'll bet Kevin Dayhoff knows about it.