xtcian

4/20/03 Columbia County, NY I'm sorry,

4/20/03 Columbia County, NY

I'm sorry, but Easter is just totally cool. I've often droned on about how I love Halloween, but Easter at least in my family – is one of those holidays that sneak up on you and is always a fucking blast. When I was a kid, we used to get Marshmallow Peeps and hollow chocolate bunnies; in 1981, we not only got the J. Geils "Freeze Frame" album in our Easter baskets, but "Beauty and the Beat" by the Go-Go's as well. In college, my mom sent me a pink and green madras shirt from the Gap, which was a lot cooler than it sounds.

I appreciate all pagan rituals like trick-or-treating, pumpkin carving and scarfing black-eyed peas on New Year's Day - but dyeing eggs is so cool that I wish we could do something similar for our wedding. By the time Michelle and I were done, we had 29 eggs in various shades of puke, a 70-degree day, and 5 acres of farmland on which to hide them.

Jamie and Susan brought their kids Johanna and Sophie over, nine and four years old respectively, which is ground zero for the Easter Egg Hunt demographic. You've never seen two kids more psyched to find eggs in your life; it reminded me of filmstrip re-enactments of the land grabs in Oklahoma. I thought I'd make it Sophie-based by "hiding" a couple in plain sight, but within three nanoseconds, she had found one I placed high in a tree. Next year, there's going to be no dumbing down, damnit.

One Easter in Iowa, it was so blindlingly cold outside that we had to hide the eggs inside the house. Kent did the hiding for us younger siblings, and we thought we'd found them all - until this horrifying sulfuric death-fart stench began overtaking the house sometime in May. It took us weeks to locate the source: a decaying Easter egg shoved into a basement air duct.

Similarly, three of the eggs were not found today, even after I looked for them later. They will sit out on the grounds, decaying in deep blues and vibrant reds, tricolor splashes of disintegrating oval melting back into the Earth and giving pungent life to our fields.

Sophie on the hunt for eggs this afternoon

me in 1972 doing the same