BUNNY HOPPER

Easter Sunday is just a few days off, and forgive me, Jesus, but I have always been gaga for Easter egg hunting. Big Bore grumbles that it’s a pagan ritual--point well taken--yet he’s always foaming at the bit to load up on the malted milk chocolate “Easter robin eggs” this time of year, so go figure. I told him he can’t badmouth searching for Easter eggs if he’s going to consume them in mass quantities.

When we were kids, we always had an egg hunt in our yard after we got home from church. As you can tell by the above pictures, Big Sis and Beans weren’t quite as enthusiastic as the miniature Flaming Bore. Our town had an egg hunt for kids on the old courthouse lawn. One year I found a special blue egg (nothing plastic in those days) hidden at the base of a big elm. It had a #6 written on it, which meant it was a prize winner. I was just shaking in my shoes with excitement, and when I went to the bandstand to see what I’d won--wow!! A bag of Hershey’s kisses from Self Service Grocery! I’d never won anything before, so I was in victorious chocolate heaven.

I quit believing in the Easter Bunny the year Sir Rabbit went overboard and left me a red wagon. I rationalized that a hippety-hopper could possibly leave me colored eggs, but there was no way in hell he could drag a Radio Flyer up the porch steps.

Another memorable Easter was the time it rained and I hid the eggs inside the house for my younger siblings. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a list of where I’d placed the two dozen hard-boiled babies, and I hid two of them so well that they were never found--until a few weeks later when we sniffed them out. Uh-oh.

When I taught school, I would have an Easter egg hunt for the yearbook staff. These were plastic eggs with mini peanut butter cups and extra credit slips inside them. I had fun hiding them, and the students--ages 15-18--never complained (to my face, anyway) that they were too old and sophisticated to be looking.

Here’s to Easter egg memories. May none of yours be rotten.