When TJ was four months old I got him an Easter card. It was one of those fold-out cards that opened out to four bunnies. I taped it to his playpen so he could look up at it. (Whatever happened to playpens? How come you never see or hear about playpens anymore? Are they now considered child abuse?) I've never forgotten the verse that was on the card, even though that was 34 years ago. "Happy Easter, Happy Spring, Happy Happy Everything." I loved that verse—obviously!
This morning I looked out my bathroom window and saw a robin hop from the fence down to the driveway by my car. Eureka! It's spring!
As a child growing up in Florida, I always read about robins being the harbingers of spring. I'm convinced that all children's educational literature that talks about the seasons is written by Yankees. Those damned Yankees just don't understand how we Suthun (that's "Southern", for those of you who can't hear my drawl) people think. We have a frame of reference that's all about water and sand, oceans and lakes, heat and humidity. There's about a month of autumn, three days of winter, and a couple months of spring. That leaves nine months for summer. Every year.
We don't know snow and daffodils and fall leaves. I remember having to write an essay in Freshman English at Southern Missionary College. (Okay, I rarely admit to having spent a year at Southern Missionary College. I did. I hated it.) I wrote about how ugly the brown leaves were, and my teacher gave me a bad grade. Damned Yankee.
But today, many years after those second- and third-grade verses about robins and spring, I saw a robin and got the spring thing.
Today I went with the Goulds to St. John's Episcopal and saw faces I remembered from Tyler's college days when he was Ron Gould's assistant at St. John's. Then we went to the Youngstown Country Club for brunch and had a delightful time visiting, with a beautiful vista of snow-covered greens over our shoulders.
If you're religious, I hope you had a blessed hope-filled Easter.
If you're not, I hope you had a fun eggy day.
If you don't believe in any of that stuff, I hope you had a quiet non-commercial day.
I had all of those!
1 comment:
Where did you sit? I would have loved to see you!
We were in the south transept (aka "Chaos Corner"). Max was commenting pretty loudly on the service, as usual.
Glad you had a nice Easter!
Tani
Post a Comment