Easter Monday: Tales from the long past

Easter Monday is the day after Resurrection Sunday, which can come in March or April. The date is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox.

When I was in elementary school, in the 1960s, there were no classes on Good Friday and Easter Monday. I have shared my memories of this date across platforms, so these stories may sound familiar. My most confusing Easter Monday was when I was a young girl of seven or eight.

There was an egg hunt that afternoon, and while standing on the front porch, I saw other children running across my yard heading to the church.

I don't recall if my great-grandmother told me I could not attend, but she must have. As I watched the boys and girls running and saying to me, "Come on," I recall looking back toward the front door, then running into the yard and going with them.

The church was less than half a block away, sitting on the side of the road with a hill behind it. The area has now been leveled and paved with a new church building on the hillside rather than near the road. Still, my memories of that clapboard building remain.

There was one family in the community who did not attend our church, and they lived further up the hill. Between their home and the church, there was a lot of land. It was a combination of rocks, grass, weeds, and trees. Cactus plants, which we called Devil tongues, were abundant. If you fell into one, it was painful.

There were two outhouses-the one on the left for females and the one on the right for males. The Easter eggs had been hidden in this area, and we had fun finding them.

For me, this location had a magical feeling. It was an area where a wonderful fresh smell, and turtles appeared after it rained. The aroma of honeysuckle became stronger after a rainstorm, and asparagus and polk salad grew. As an imaginative child, I thought perhaps guardian angels, fairies, or gnomes lurked unseen.

I was happy to find so many eggs on that particular Easter Monday and thought my great-grandmother would be proud of me. When I returned home, I was smiling as I presented my full Easter basket to her.

Great grandma did not say a word, but gave me an icy stare of disapproval and turned her back. She refused to talk to me until the next day. If she had scolded me or whipped me and explained that I had done something wrong, I would have understood.

This behavior became a pattern with my great-grandmother. When I was 16, a boy called me every afternoon at around 1:30 for a few weeks. My grandmother never told me she didn't want boys calling the house. She just stopped talking to me after each phone call until the next day.

Back to that Easter Monday, I experienced confusion, joy, and sadness. The longing to do what the other kids were doing, filling my basket with eggs, and being rejected with the silent treatment were a lot for a child.

A few years later, my cousins who lived nearby had Easter egg hunts on the Monday following Resurrection Sunday. We would find the eggs, re-hide them, and hunt all over again.

Their dog, Taco, and some of their chickens, adults, and babies would run between our feet. Sometimes we fell, and a few baby chicks got squashed. Later in the summer, as we played tag and hide and seek, we would step on eggs we had not found, and they would stink. I hope you enjoyed this Easter Monday tale.