Welcome Easter, Good Bye Spring
On Easter Sunday, we woke up extra early to catch the Easter Bunny hiding the eggs. But Dad took the boys into a room and distracted them, so the Easter Bunny wasn’t seen by anyone but the garden gnome who doesn’t talk. We don’t usually get visits from him, but I suspect that he knows that the children are growing and hunting for eggs is fun fun fun. So the lads and lass donned their homemade cloaks (that I fashioned out of old bedsheets) and proceeded to the backyard. It was COLD! Well, about 60 degrees, but we are not used to that down here in the swamps. After ten minutes of searching for eggs, we figured that we had found them all, so we went inside for a nutritious Easter breakfast of Reese’s Pieces and Brach’s Original Jelly Beans.
When I came back from playing the piano at the church, Dad was finishing the last touches for the birthday party. His mom and he share a birthday which usually lands on or around Easter. At 1pm, our party started, and we feasted on homemade herring dip, potato salad, and ice cream birthday cake.
Ok, well, now that Easter has come, it’s time for summer! Yea, that’s the weather here. On Easter Monday, the birds of prey were packing their things to head north, the bugs came out of hiding, and the rain thunderstorms came. Not that I’m complaining. We really did need water – and still do. The county-enforced water restrictions have not yet been lifted because a thunderstorm or two or three isn’t going to dramatically increase the levels of the aquifer.
The storms were beautiful, however. A severe system passed by one night at bedtime. I was afraid that the storm would wake and frighten the children, but they slept through the night (unusual for the trio). We are usually in bed by 10:30pm but couldn’t get to sleep until close to midnight. It wasn’t because of the cracking of the lightning nor the booming thunder. It was that the lightning was so darn bright! It was like daylight in the room for several seconds at a time. Closing the windows isn’t an option because we’d be roasting; we turn the A/C unit on during the real summer, when it’s swampy and the palmetto bugs are flying across the room.
A storm here. A storm there. The last storm was the height of this particular system. Around 10am on Thursday, gusts knocked off coconuts and palm leaves, which is very dangerous if you’re driving along a row of palm trees. What’s worse, and this is gut-wrenching, none of us went outside to play this week, and no laundry was dried on the line!
*faints* It’s a lot like being snowed in… except there’s no snow. And I’ve never even seen snow, so what am I talking about?
