Posing in our Sunday Easter best in the backyard…………The joy of patent-leather yellow shoes to go with the most beautiful dress I had ever seen…….The year my Mom thought the washer was a good place to hide my basket……..and Easter showers when all the ladies in their finery had to dash from curb to church holding their hats and clutching their raincoats……..and Daffodils, heads bent low from the wetness and the vivid green of the grass when the sun finally came out.

I remember……so excited the cousins were coming to visit…..and my Grandmother boiling eggs in her large pot, fretting about how many cracked……and egg dye making stains on the towel, and finally, seeing who could do the ugliest egg after dipping from one color to the next. I remember the year we hoped and prayed for a joyous sermon, only to get “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down”……and Aimee at the organ and “Up from the grave He arose……”

And I can still see my Grandmother’s dining room table and the giant Easter bunny cookie she always made, scotched taped from the back because it always broke. And the jelly beans she places around it, along with the grass.

I remember holding hands and singing “Morning has broken………” at my Aunt’s Methodist church sunrise service. I remember wonderful Easter dramas and over the top excitement because “so and so” said they would come to church. Especially the one year Jesus disappeared and we still don’t know how they did it.

And the year in Arizona when we saw the mother duck leading her ducklings on the way to church on an impossibly beautiful morning. Every Easter, I remember these things.

Every Easter, I feel the hope all over again.