Easter evokes a lifetime of fond family memories

He’s joined by my two kid brothers in their bow ties and sport coats, wrists already dangling far beyond the edge of their coats. And here’s me at 13, grown up enough to wear what I learned to call a sheath dress. No more frilly bows.

My dad grabs the camera, allowing my mother to stroll into range, wearing a hat she wore only on Easter. It does not become her.

And then we are off to the First Baptist Church, where, like every other Sunday, we will sing songs of hope and salvation and walking with Jesus in the garden. Beautiful old hymns.

Then it’s a short car ride home, where we will immediately shuck off our Sunday finery and tend to other pressing matters — such as exploring just what’s in the bottom of our Easter baskets.

Some time prior, my mother had invested in Easter baskets so sturdy you could have carried wet wash in them. Naturally, she brought them out every year, along with the recycled plastic grass where all the jelly beans and hollow chocolate bunnies would nestle. Why was it the bunnies always looked so much better than they tasted?

Ham was always on the menu for Easter dinner, served either by my mother or my grandmother, who lived just a few blocks away. Accompanying the meal was a salad, vegetables, rolls and mashed potatoes swimming in red-eye gravy — something I’ve never been able to master.

After dinner, the men would retire to the couch and the easy chair for a nap, while we kids played with the new paddle balls that always came with our baskets — at least until the elastic string invariably broke.

One year, we had actual Easter chicks to play with — something I regard as a temporary lapse in judgment on the part of my mother. Naturally, as soon as the chicks outgrew their cuteness, we ignored them. A few months later my father took out the ax — a fact one of the chickens initially failed to grasp as it, now headless, chased my youngest brother around the backyard.

My mother, who grew up on a farm, cooked the chickens, but I don’t remember any of us much enjoying that meal. Thank God she never brought home a rabbit.

The first year I was married, my mother brought my husband and me Easter baskets. “What is this?” my husband asked, incredulous. “Why, it’s my Easter basket,” I replied. Of course.

Fifteen years ago, my mom died just a few days before Easter. When my father came to dinner at my house that year, he brought with him an Easter basket and some eggs he had boiled and colored himself. Six years later, he too died, just a few days shy of Easter.

I don’t fill up Easter baskets anymore. But I still dye the eggs, hiding them around the house for the grandkids to find. One Easter we lost track of one of the eggs. We found it years later, rolled beneath a couch we were carrying out of the house during a move, still perfectly preserved.

Before I color my Easter eggs, I always write out on the shells the names of those I love, past and present. One will always say “Mom”; the other “Dad.”