Blog

The home of my mother- and father-in-law has been the Easter gathering place for the ever-growing family for the last three decades. In my first years as part of that family my own young children and their young cousins were the joyful recipients of their uncle’s Easter egg hiding. Little plastic eggs filled with candy hidden throughout the front and back yards in obvious and incredibly-not-obvious places (the best hidden eggs would be found the following year. Or later.). 

The whole thing always signaled spring, rebirth, new young lives in a new young world.

Today we did one last Easter egg hunt.

My parents-in-law have been gone for some time, and the tradition was kept alive by my brother-in-law who lived in their house. But with his passing a few months ago, the house is steadily emptying into a hollow shell for someone new to make a life in.

But today, one last time, my now-adult niece and nephew and I hid dozens of eggs throughout the bare branches and hardy  grass, beneath fence slats and behind car tires in the driveway – all to be found by the now teenage children of the children I remember from my first visits here.  

And among those adult children was my own grown daughter.

And she and the teenaged child of a grown niece (who was a little girl in my wedding party) walked and ran and explored with the very youngest child there – Lightning Bug – who was in her first real egg hunt, just figuring how this game works, the joy in discovery, a giddy thrill moments before this place will no longer be the place of any family gathering.

One last spring here, one last new young life in a new young world, stretching my father- and mother- and brother-in-law’s love from the last century deep into this one.

The time slippage was real, and aching, and beautiful.