Episode 34- Easter with my family

I'm going to take a momentary break from my usual semi-snarky, semi-witty, observational commentary...but just for a moment, to reveal the soft side that not too many people seem to think I have.

Today is Easter Sunday. Instead of being with my family, I'm home alone blogging. My parents and daughter are on the west coast, the rest of my family is in Ohio. I couldn't make either trip this time around. I miss them. Even if I don't tell them enough.

Easter is the one holiday in my family that usually gets us all together. In my youth, these family gatherings would be split between my grandmother's and her sister's--my great aunt's-- house. At my grandmother's we would do Easter breakfast. I would get to drink coffee--even at age 7. I would wake up early looking for my basket from "the Easter Bunny." I knew even then, that my basket came from the hands of my mom and grandmother. After breakfast I would don my Easter dress either for church or for the trip over to my great-aunt's. We would dye eggs, hunt for them in my grandmother's back yard. Eat cake that my mother and I or my aunt would bring. One year we made finger toffee. My older cousins/uncles who thought they knew everything, got their hands stuck together in molasses.

My grandmother died of cancer just after Easter 1984.

Every Easter after that one became significant. My family moved around some and eventually fractured over the next couple of years with the back to back deaths of my grandfather and step-grandfather. We spend most subsequent Easter Sundays at the home of my great aunt. It usually goes something like this...a crowd of family and friends in the neighborhood of 25-50 people, church, a huge dinner, an Easter egg hunt for the kids, a liquor bottle hunt for the adults (using miniature bottles) and hours spent jumping on the moon bounce (my family owns one) in the front yard or playing video games or bean bag toss in the garage.

My cousins and I got older and it became our kids on Easter Sunday hunting for eggs, jumping on the moon bounce. I bounce with them. I play Easter bunny, fixing baskets for the kids. I watch them play in their Easter Sunday clothes as we, now parents, urge them not to mess them up. My mom, now mamaw and my great aunt and the older adults talk in the living room or smoke in the second kitchen at the back of the house. My family, for better or worse, seems like a family.

Today is Easter Sunday. And instead of being with my family, I'm home alone blogging. And I miss them. Even if I don't tell them enough.