We have hosted Easter for so many years (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2019) with the exception of the year that we got a stomach bug the night before and just packed up the dinner for others, we kind of only knew one way to celebrate. After mixing our personal and religious observations with family secular traditions, we would host a dinner and egg hunts for all the family and friends we could gather to us. Every single year, it both stressed me out before and brought great pleasure during and after.
This year was going to be different; we would be with Dwayne's brother, Dan and his wife, Deborah, and a few crew, as we traveled up an Amazon tributary. Perhaps I would have tried to purchase chocolate bunnies for everyone in our day in Manaus before boarding, but we wouldn't have been able to add the Evil Easter Bunny to our luggage, and I don't think we would have found any churches accessible either by geography or language. It was going to be our own restart.
But we got another restart instead. What if it is just the 5 of us for Easter, just a third, or even fourth, of our usual? What if we still celebrated, the religious holiday, or silly traditions, and ourselves?
It was an amazing day.
I came up with a bacon, bread, and blueberry breakfast to eat while we watched the service on youtube live. Then the Evil Easter Bunny hid the bunnies with clues of where the baskets were hidden. Dwayne got to learn that we keep the extra airfilters in a box on top of the wardrobe in the mudroom. All these years, and he was unaware....much to EEB's knowledge and amusement.
While we were still dressed up (yes, Wes considers himself well dressed in black polyester pants--because they are uncomfortable enough to be dressy, but not torturous like, gasp!, jeans--and the sweater Grandma knitted 4 or 5 years ago), we brought fresh bouquets to my aunt's homecare and we were able to wave and shout hello from the sidewalk. Then we did the same for my parents, but got to stay much longer chatting from the lawn to the front porch. Grown ups are invariably boring, so my feral children wrestled together, much like I picture young wombats would intoxicated on spring sunshine.
I'm not going to lie--I was highly amused by their spirited hijinks.
Then the good stuff started. After Dwayne and I had a little too much fun hiding the eggs, I spread out a blanket in the grass with a good book, Dwayne dug into his favorite outdoor pastime, weeding the grass (two marijuana terms in one clause!), and the kids hunted candy.
The kids surprised us with another egg hunt. They had found the camouflaged eggs--ones made to look like grass, rocks, etc-- and filled them will little drawings and love notes and ordered us to find them.
Then we turned the tables, brought out a dose of the EEB, and hid the camo eggs so well that they were hunting them while we made ("made", thanks Costco!) our Easter dinner. Salmon and lamb, veggies, and no deviled eggs. Since the kids don't eat hardboiled eggs, we let our first Lent go by without dyeing eggs, and maybe I'm hardboiled myself, but I didn't particularly miss (mess!) it.
A toast: to resurrection, to good things, and to each other.
Happy Easter, friends!
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