The Story behind the Easter Egg Pictures
My Mom-mom, whom I love dearly and miss even more, absolutely adored Easter. Bunnies decorated her house year-round, but not the tacky kind, rather, the lovingly hand-painted kind with freakish eyes that follow one around the room. Since she passed away, September 20, 2006, holidays aren't as special to me. They're empty. Easter is difficult, worse than Thanksgiving even, especially since the last two have been crowned with an absolutely beautiful blue sky and gentle breeze. Last year, the sight of the morning beauty caused me to crawl right back into the bed. It wasn't right that she wasn't able to share in the fantastic day, and I wished, for the first and only time in my life, that I wasn't alive that day either. Following that, I threw a royal fit at my in-laws, my husband drove me to the sanctuary of my Mother's house. And in her wisdom, she refrained from saying much of anything but rather, she distracted me. With eggs. She hid eggs for me, a grown 29 year old woman. And it worked, and I will never forget that she did that for me. That act brought me back from the brink.
Enter Easter 2008, and my cousin Jennifer is struggling with her health, more specifically, brain tumors that won't quit her life. The newest development is that she will have to take two new Chemo drugs intravenously. Needless to say, neither of us wanted to freakin' celebrate. But when she called me, just prior to Easter, crying from the other end of the line to tell me her life would NOT be going back to normal but rather it will become more frustrating and painful with Chemo... I didn't say much of anything... I asked her if she wanted me to come down and spend Easter with her. "Do you want me to hide Easter eggs for you?", I asked. "Can we dye real ones?" she asked. Anything for you, I thought.
So my husband & I went to Greensboro and he actually hid the eggs for us this year, allowing me to be distracted for the second beautiful Easter morning since my Mom-mom's passing. My mother contributed 19 plastic eggs with profound quotes in them, so we paused each time we found one and read it aloud to each other. And these are the photos I took to memorialize the situation, to say Thank You to my mother and my husband for helping my cousin and myself deal with ourselves, to remember next year around this time that I can and will make it through another Easter without my Mom-mom, and to preserve what little youth I still possess.
To top it off, the egg wraps that I clearly fell in love with came from Mom-mom's house - circa 1977, same year that I was born.
She is still with me. Jennifer is still strong enough to smile and laugh and be my greatest heroine.
This what Easter is to me now.
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