Easter Eggs

Sharing Stories

March 24, 2024 at 5:07 p.m.

This blown egg is delicate like my mother’s, but this one is from Pinterest.

...by Ariele M. Huff

Easter Eggs

When I feel sad or worried, the rescues that often come to me are ways my mother transformed our house for seasons and holidays.

She was a talented and gifted artist who quit teaching school to raise my sister and me. Later, she returned to the world to be awarded with many successes. But, for you, dear reader, to understand how magical it was to live with her, you must know that we had very little…or less than that.

She didn’t drive (no women in our family did—against the rules in Missouri at the time her mother had been raised). Women and children were to wait for the husband or son or other man to bring the cart and horse around to the front door where the bench was provided, as the wait was often hours. Somehow that practice stuck. At 27, I was the first woman in our family to learn how to drive a car.

So, Mom walked about three miles to the nearest grocery and dime store to get what she needed, lugging home a bag…at that time filled with five dollars’ worth of materials—things she hadn’t gotten in the one-day grocery pick up with my father on weekends.

Coming home in the winter, we might arrive to the round kitchen table, a bedroom mirror centered on it and sprinkled lightly with powdered sugar snow and pipe-cleaner skaters.

Or the house could be fragrant with cookies or a cake she’d scrimped ingredients for from bare shelves. Or a pumpkin pie with baked crust triangle eyes, nose, and smile.

And Easter was one of her best projects. Days beforehand, she’d gently tap holes at both ends of a dozen eggs, blowing the inner eggs into a bowl to create angel food cake or omelets for the holiday. The shells were scrupulously cleaned and put to dry in the egg carton.

Then, she went to work with our little kid watercolor boxes complete with two tiny-pointed brushes.

Each egg was different. Each egg was a beautiful work of art. Flowers, leaves, small animals like bunnies and chicks were always included, but some stretched her topics even further…a dark blue night sky with stars shining bright white. (She’d used a little wax and the tiny brush to paint the stars, then, once dry, she’d delicately scrape the wax off.) Some of the eggs had symbols—a tall, decorated urn with Middle Eastern shapes. Every kind of flower, tree, fruits, artfully done faces, our dog, our cats, our father, me, my sister, so many every year. Every shading of colors, mixed by her unflagging willingness to spend nights doing this project.

Each year, I took all the eggshells that were for me and put them into an empty egg carton that sat behind a door in a cupboard. I took them with me to my first home where my daughter was born, and then to another house, treasuring these pieces of art above other objects I gave up to slenderize moves. I kept even the ones that had small cracks, trying to make little mends here and there.

Finally, six years ago, at 69, I let them go. Sadly, without taking photos. I guess we were too busy at the right moment.

But though they are gone, I still recall many of them, seeing her diligently creating them. How beautiful, how lovingly made. How reminiscent of the other amazing things she did through the years for us…to make home feel special, to help us feel that life was good, would always be good, and that we were loved.

Ariele Huff leads writing groups, and Ancient Healing for Modern Stress as well as online classes on numerous writing topics and life topics. She works from her home in Aberdeen, Washington.

Connect with me at ariele@comcast.net. We’ll set up times to meet if you want all virtual. If you don’t want ZOOM, Skype, or online, we can also do some as phone chat sessions.

For readers who’d like a list of my available classes, connect with me at ariele@comcast.net and request a flier of classes.

Check Amazon.com for my many paperbacks and eBooks. There are a couple of free downloads for eBooks at this time. Guilty Pleasures is one.

SHARING STORIES is a weekly column for and about the 50 plus crowd living in the Puget Sound region. Send your stories and photos to ariele@comcast.net. Tell local or personal stories; discuss concerns around aging and other issues; share solutions, good luck, and reasons to celebrate; poems are fine too. Pieces may be edited or excerpted. We reserve the right to select among pieces. Photos are always a plus and a one-sentence bio is requested (where you live, maybe age or career, retired status, etc.).

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