Happy Easter

In Our Easter Bonnets  

For the first time in almost 40 years, the Easter bunny did not hide eggs at our house for my children and grandchildren to find. I did see a six-foot bunny in the back of a Key Biscayne police pickup truck, leading a parade of golf carts through the neighborhood. Sirens blaring, and horns honking.

When he was very young, Patten and I were shopping at the grocery store the day before Easter. He covertly pointed out a man in a tuxedo with a huge amount of candy in his cart. When we got a couple of aisles away, Patten whispered to me that he knew who the man was: the Easter bunny in disguise. Seemed reasonable.

Mary and Spaulding Dying Easter Eggs
2005

Now the grocery stores have instituted one-way aisles and limits on the number of people allowed in at once to facilitate physical distancing. I have decided to stop using the term social distancing because we are actually more in touch with friends and family now than ever. We just can’t physically  touch them. My friend sent a picture of her college-age daughter eating Easter dinner out on their porch. Near, yet far.

Nightmare on Elm Street, Peeps Edition  

Another casualty of the virus is the Peeps Show at Flamingo Studio in Lake Worth. My friend Marjorie and I would make a trek up each year to see dioramas made with Peeps, the marshmallow chicks, bunnies, etc. made by candy company Just Born. Before we went the first time, I called to see how long the exhibit would be open. “Easter, or until the ants get them, whichever comes first.”  We decided to hustle on up.

From Peeps chicks having fun riding carousels to bunny Peeps massacring each other, someone made it in Peeps.

Grant and I prepped our Easter dinner of herb-encrusted lamb, asparagus, and roasted potatoes before settling on the couch to attend our congregation’s Easter service. Around the world, ministers, preachers and priests led worship to empty buildings while their flocks watched on their TVs and computers. Yet, as always, there were defiant groups whose members came together, some claiming their god(s) would protect them, others asserting their First Ammendment rights. I shake my head in wonder.