Ten Minutes on March 23, 2008 Take Two

Ten Minutes on March 23, 2008 Take Two

Easter, like Christmas, is often about children getting up early and adults getting up earlier to hide things. This Easter the inimitable Ruth was gone, so Cat and Kelsey organized the hiding, the running of the smaller children, and then the running of the older ones. I love every part of it, especially how so many of the older kids are quite happy thank you very much to have a foot in being just a kid still, whatever that means to them.

I opened one eye, then the other, and when I got the All Clear I woke up out of my waking dream that I lay in a bedroom which was a treehouse, soft cool sheets on my skin and birdsong and children and laughter quick now here always. I think there was some mildly erotic element as well, morphing relatively seamlessly into being both open to touch (the sheets, the air, the sleep still hanging over the body, a light dusting of sleeping powder). Sleep to awake with a stop at mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….

I could hear children’s voices buzzing in the flowers somewhere and Kelsey’s voice, the one built for Command of Children, a trumpeting sound and nice to hear at that, since it means she is Back With Us and not Away At College. The clock looked at me with no expression, simply letting me know that 9:02 had now been replaced digitally by 9:12 and then 9:25. Jump up get out of bed drag a comb across your head downstairs get the camera check the phone wonder where your family is check clothing and head out into the stunning sunlight of 9:33 on an Easter Sunday in the year of our Lord 2008.

Apparently our Lord has given over running of the proceedings to an also absent Easter Bunny, and his stand-ins Kelsey and Cat and other adults who hid eggs in wonderful places on the head of a stone Buddha in a birdcage suspended from a tree behind the leg of a bench a table a marble horse. Chocolate eggs and plastic eggs and hardboiled old school eggs, nestled in the crook of a stunning cherry tree, slid under tufts of grass on the green, highlighted against the corners of windows. The kids gather on the steps and the parents take pictures and movies and shout out orders and when things will start and people run because they are late and pictures must be delayed then retaken and the even more late come some are slightly abused by the now rowdy crowd of sugar fiends and egg hiding aficionados.

Somehow all the adults get their shot at the espresso machine, the pictures are taken, and the smaller children bristle as the countdown, well, counts down, and off they go, not simply searching for earthly delights, but finding them hidden everywhere, over and over, who knew the world contained such things just for the looking. And these things, and the hiding of them, are all accomplished by adults who then watch the chasing of these things, this element of all quests, and this most elemental wish, that what we quest for is worth it when and if we find it.

The whole day is then spent hanging out with each other, comparing loot, doing summery stuff you do when you are on Spring Break and the weather is So Very Fine. Maybe later you will be somewhere different, a long way from here, perhaps dispirited, or at the least challenged and humbled and even in a pickle, and you’ll search for something to put on the scales over on Life Worth Living, or When I Was Happy, and you’ll come upon this day sticking up out of its memory slot, practically waving its hand saying Remember me, Remember me!