Easter PJs

 

       I couldn’t wait. I dyed Easter eggs a whole month ago and the little guys helped, the 22-month-old here dipping his from the red to the green to the purple so that in the end his eggs all turned a blackish-brown, the color of earth. The earth is cracking moistly open now. It looks like the surface of a pan of brownies set to cooling on the rack.

        Remember the bad old days when you could buy live chicks at Easter and they were dyed purple and pink? You could buy baby bunnies too if you didn’t mind spending the rest of your life toting bales of hay.

      I myself have always yearned to have a bunny but ‘Noooo’ intones my vet. ‘You never put a rabbit together with cats.’ An yet my new friend Jen tells me her cats used to curl right up against her bunny for their naps.

      Easters when I was little my mother used to make a special cake shaped like a rabbit which her diary says I called our ‘Eating Bunny.’ This was almost 57 years ago, the month after I turned three but I still have the heavy iron mold for it right downstairs, come to think of it. Was it her spirit that made me reach for the pound-cake mix at the store just now?

     I think I’ll get up early tomorrow and make her cake. And when those babies that would have been her great-grand-babies come later on, maybe we’ll dye the frosting yellow or pink - or,  if this Little One Who Doesn’t Yet Talk has his way, the blackish-brown of the earth after a good hard rain like today’s.