Happy Easter to all who celebrate!

One of my great memories of Easter is the Sunrise Service that used to be held on the village green in the town where I grew up. The town I grew up in was, in some ways, a midwestern town trying to be a Ye Olde New England town (it has to do with the history of the place, so they come about it authentically). Anyway, we had a village green with a bandstand and a clock tower.

And most years, there was an Easter sunrise service. I don't remember if different churches ran it year to year, or if it was just the one my family and I belonged to that did it, or if it was kind of a generalized Protestant Easter service. But I remember it as being very special.

Now, this was northeastern Ohio, so lots of years it was kind of cold Easter morning. I remember some years being a little disappointed about having to wear a heavy coat over my Easter dress (and not knowing what to do with the corsage - many years my dad would by my mom and me orchid corsages to wear on Easter).

But it was still special being outside for the service. Usually it really WAS a Sunrise service, held very early in the morning. (I remember the pattern in my family was that my brother and I were allowed to look at our Easter baskets briefly, but not really dig into them until after we got back from services. And somehow, the Easter bunny always knew to wait to hide the eggs until after we got back...I think it must have happened while my brother and I were standing out on the porch while my dad took pictures of us).

But it was special, standing out in the wet grass, singing the old hymns, hearing the same words I had heard every Easter morning probably since before I was old enough to know what the words meant. And to rejoice again, to feel like the world had been made new again. To sense the sigh of forgiveness again, and to be reminded that everything would, somehow, eventually be OK. That good would triumph over evil, in fact that it had already, evil just didn't know it yet.

It's funny that the really harrowing aspects of Good Friday never really hit me - I never really understood them until I was an adult. Perhaps in a way that was a good thing, to protect me from them when I was young. Of course, with no Good Friday there is no Easter, but I think as a kid I understood Easter better than I did Good Friday.

At some point they stopped doing the sunrise services - I don't know if it was after a couple of years of it being rained out, or if the people who organized it didn't have time to plan it any more, or if too many people complained it was too early (and I still think that was part of the specialness of it), or what - but I still think an Easter service in a church is not quite the same as one outside, in the cool damp of the morning. It somehow made hearing what Mary Magdalene and the other women saw seem more immediate, more vivid.

Most years after the service we'd go home, hunt for the dyed hard boiled eggs (and neither my brother nor I liked hard-boiled eggs. My parents must have been very patient to let us dye a dozen of them, knowing they'd be eating egg salad or eggs cut up on sandwiches for days), look at the stuff in our Easter basket, and then either go out to brunch/lunch somewhere (if we could get reservations far enough in advance) or have something at home (if not, or if we decided we'd rather eat at home that year. I know a lot of years we had the traditional ham on Easter).

Easter candy tended to hang around for a while. Usually the "Peeps" (those marshmallow things - it seems people either love them or loathe them) got eaten first (I love Peeps and always wait for them to arrive in the stores every spring. And yes, I still buy them as an adult) and the chocolate went, but some of the other stuff hung around for a while. And if I was particularly lucky in a given year, I'd get a small stuffed toy rabbit or chicken in the basket. Not always, but it was nice when it happened.

Now as an adult, I go to church. That's the important thing. I didn't have a new dress this year, or an orchid corsage, or an Easter basket for that matter. But that's not what's important - just as now for me Christmas seems to really come during the Christmas Eve service, the important part of Easter is being in the big church and singing the familiar hymns and hearing yet again the words that I have heard, as I said, every year since before I was old enough to know what they meant.

And once again to sigh that sigh - that things WILL ultimately be all right. Maybe not here, maybe not right now. But they will be.

The rest of the day is a fairly quiet day. I'm doing some hand quilting and thinking about sewing the rest of the current quilt top together.