Crow's Egg | Empty Nest Parenting: Grown and Flown

We wish a very happy holiday to all of our Grown and Flown readers who are enjoying coincident celebrations of Passover and/or Easter this weekend. Here is a post from a G&F writer who recalls a family Easter tradition.

AHB

My husband loved a soft boiled egg in an egg cup, sliced perfectly and scooped out steaming hot. My daughter prefers those laid by the folks at Cadbury, but I love Easter eggs. Pink, green, lavender, blown out or hard-boiled, I love them all. Dyeing eggs is something I carry with me to this day. As a child, we dyed eggs on Good Friday with Paas dye and then painted them with watercolors, gouache and even oil paint. ?We glued on bits of fabric and encircled them with lace. I once colored the eggs all different shades of blue and made a huge nest for them in the middle of the dinner table. It was quite dramatic; however, in my enthusiasm, I scarcely left room for the plates. Who cared about Easter dinner? I was more interested in the giant nest of small branches from our blossoming quince and my heavenly azure eggs.We had an Easter Egg Hunt at our house every year when my daughter was small. Our first one, to which we had invited thirty children and their parents, (what were we thinking?) was the most memorable. I prepared an Irish brunch and flowers were all over the house. The gardens were just stirring . Our rocky outcroppings had some dips and cracks that seemed ideal for hiding. We purchased a mix of large foil covered eggs and small ones? we reasoned that our little scavengers would appreciate really ?good? chocolate. We spent a small fortune on those eggs. The night before my husband gathered all the eggs and set out to hide them. He spent a good hour and a half under the stars scouring the property with a flashlight, finding all the nooks and crannies where a tiny gold egg could hide. I was busy making small baskets, distracting my daughter from the forty-nine-year-old Easter Bunny outside. Saturday, the sun washed the sky a glorious pale pink and we were ready.

With forty-five minutes to go before the onslaught of thirty restless egg hunting warriors we decided to do a last minute check on the eggs. Prescient! I glanced out the window and saw my husband standing still in the middle of the lawn with a puzzled look on his face. Then he began running from spot to spot. Not an egg in sight. Foil strewn everywhere, but not a single egg. I glanced up in the huge trees on the lawn. ?Almost every branch bore a silhouette against the puffy white clouds ? two dozen crows, smacking their beaks, eyeing the scene below like a buffet table. Every egg was eaten- every handmade, Belgian chocolate egg! That raucous bunch certainly hadn?t given up chocolate for Lent! With laughter and red faces, we quickly got Hershey?s to the rescue and literally threw them all over the lawn and gardens. My husband stood out there until the hunters arrived. At eleven o?clock, my daughter and all the other kids scrambled across the lawn and over the rocks, running from corner to corner gleefully putting their eggs in my little beribboned baskets. We never owned up to the crow fest?and we never hid a single egg outside the night before again.

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