Easter eggs

Yesterday was the first snowy Easter I can remember. I went for a walk and found, among other things, a loose jumbly nest of sticks at the top of a Hercules’-club tree that cradled a small mound of snow, and not far away, an egg-shaped melt-spot on the surface of a rock, resting in the shadows of branches. Without meaning to, it seemed, I’d gone on an Easter egg hunt. It made me think back…

Easter morning when I was small meant candy — the first since Halloween; a gift or two, usually including a new kite, which I would struggle valiantly to fly in the mountaintop’s transverse winds; & a half-dozen eggs I had helped to dye myself, those that weren’t already sea-green or blue because they’d been laid by one of our Araucana hens. We used all-natural materials, especially onion skins, which imparted a yellow or orange tint depending on how long we left the eggs in the dye bath. Wrapping them in ferns or tree leaves made lacy patterns where the veins lay against the shell. It was as if we were enacting a dream of barnyard fowl to return to the trees.

Somehow even knowing what we would find, & despite the fact that hard-boiled eggs can’t compete for taste sensation with a chocolate bar, it was still exciting to paw down through the green plastic straw — reused year after year — & lift them out, bright & smooth as pebbles on a beach. Cracking such an egg was a solemn occasion. It made us mindful, admiring the shell even as we split & crumbled it, & underneath the slick flesh no longer white, but onion-colored. The last discovery then would be a bit anti-climatic: the yolk a dark orange as with any egg from a chicken that’s free to roam, to bathe in the dust, & for whatever reason, madly flapping in front of oncoming cars, to cross the road.