The day before Easter 50 or more small children from my church and neighborhood gather at my house for the annual Easter egg hunt. This is a collective enterprise. A committee of women fills the plastic eggs and delivers them early. Then my best friend, Guin, and I hide them.
After that, we get out of the way. We are token hostesses, supplying the acres of hiding places and, more important, a house with three bathrooms. Mothers and fathers roam about, or sit on knolls and beneath trees. Widows and single men who are bored on that particular Saturday come too. Everyone is welcome.
I stand by the back door and direct the traffic to the bathrooms, hold out trash bags, and get the ointment when some child has gotten into an ant bed. Occasionally, I collect a tired mother’s baby, who is too small to participate in the hunt, and I wander around with this napping bundle drooling on my shoulder.
When I sit down, another child or two comes over and rests against my arm and tells me some secret I’m instructed not to tell another living human being-especially his or her mother. The secrets range from a boy’s telling me he has slipped out after bedtime to play with the child next door at midnight to a girl’s complaint that her mother or father forgot to pick her up at baseball practice. There isn’t much to be said. My replies are usually kisses imparted so softly that the child can barely discern the movement of my lips in that baby-fine hair. Sometimes their words to me feel no stronger than the faint spring breeze that never fails to come the day before Easter.
We rock, we swing, we talk, we sip fruit punch, we collect the eggs again and again, comparing candy hauls. The notion of time speeding by goes on holiday. I take my basket around and slip extra sugar eggs into the baskets of children who haven’t found anything. These children are the ones who don’t find many eggs year after year.
Toward the end of the two hours of playing in the sun, our friends Bubba and Rachel Jones show up and wonder how they could have gotten the time wrong again. Bubba asks Guin whether she finds many eggs after the hunt while she’s mowing the lawn, and she says, “All year long.” The thought strikes us all as very funny.
I see a glint of something pink or blue that has blown off across the field. There are numerous birds’ nests in the trees around here built with that wiry synthetic hay.
When the hunt winds down, everyone cleans up and more hugs and kisses follow. The chairperson of the hunt will ask if we can meet again same time next year, and Guin and I nod yes, absolutely. We never even discuss it; we both just say yes.
The last person to leave is the preacher, who sometimes salutes Guin or kisses the side of my face the way I kiss the heads of the little egg-hunters. The preacher’s daughter is one of the children who tells me her secrets.
It is at that moment that I always recall the only Easter egg hunt I went to that wasn’t staged at my grandmother’s house. When I was 9, my Sunday school teacher invited the six of us over to her back yard where there were not only eggs hidden about but a stuffed bunny, a chocolate bunny, and a golden egg with a dollar bill inside.
I didn’t find anything that day, but I watched those children who did. What did they have that I didn’t have? And why did one lucky girl find all three big prizes? I thought that day that the Easter egg hunt was an omen. I went home with an empty basket believing that I was going to be an unlucky person who for the rest of her life would never know the thrill of discovering any hidden treasures. Year after year, on the Saturday before Easter at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, I remember that I was wrong.
