Easter promises

Easter is such a great holiday.

As the trees fly by the railroad tracks, en route from one home to another, my mind feels saturated with sunshine. It is imprinted with the rich vibrant yellow of daffodils, forsythia, and a family gathered around the Easter table spreading a warmth even the newly liberated sun doesn’t match.

It makes sense that Easter is a holiday largely about kids – Kids are nothing but balls of unrealized potential. Everything about them says Grow! Look to the future! I can hardly wait to see what happens next!

I got to be the Easter bunny for my niece and nephew this year. After I’d snuck out barefoot into the cold morning dew to hide the eggs I was struck by a feeling… There was something both exciting and comforting about looking into that great wide green backyard right before it all began – before all the cooing and clucking aunties and grannies and friends arrived, before the hubbub of stirring gravy and warming things in the oven and pouring drinks and finding chairs for tired legs…

I looked through the kitchen window out into the yard and saw happy little bubbles of pink and pastel yellow and purple and blue – Easter eggs in hiding, waiting to be discovered. Some of them were really very close by (Eddie’s not even three, after all), peeking out from behind blades of grass and perched on low-hanging branches. Little secrets, right there out in the open if you took the time to look for them. And I knew the precious little surprises they held inside, and the “treasure” under the pine tree, as my nephew later called his Easter basket.

It was heartwarming to see little EdBear stoop down to pick up the eggs and add them lovingly to his collection. He’d call out “a egg!” when he spotted one, reaching out to receive the things that had been put there to be found by him, and put them in his basket.

It seemed like a living analogy for life… Easter eggs: bright spots in the lawn of life, gifts soon to be realized. A trail of little treasures leading up to a great big basket of goodies! All you have to do is look, and you will find them, because they are there… Follow the trail and it will lead you to unexpected joy.

And sure, maybe the goodies in life are too big or amorphous to fit inside a plastic Easter egg. But that doesn’t mean you can’t hunt for them all the same. I have a feeling there are things waiting for me out there that are even better than cashews and pastel rainbow m & m’s, and even crayons and coloring books.

So that’s going to be my mindset going forward – life as an Easter egg hunt. Looking for treasures scattered all around ahead of me, just waiting to be revealed.