Easter Memories are Complicated

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Another Easter Sunday has passed. No matter how many years may fly by I will always long to be at my Grandmother’s South Carolina homestead.  Her farm was just down the road a piece from Calabash and a stone’s throw from Ocean Drive. 

Up until I was 18, I spent the weekend of Easter traveling to or from the Palmetto state to be at my father’s mother’s farm. Longs, South Carolina was always warmer than New Jersey. Invariably you could wear short sleeves at Easter the low country. The flowers were always a month ahead of those in my little town but the place was different. 

I don’t know what made it different.   Was the time spent with my cousins and their exotic southern accents? Was it the fact that television programs weren’t really the same? On Saturday night all that aired on the tube at my Grandmother’s house was gospel quartets. Maybe I felt it was different because my Grandmother would slip a dollar bill into my hand that I would invariably spend at Stuckey’s on the ride home. No matter what it was, the experience of Easter in Horry County was such an ingrained part of my childhood and tied so inextricably to this day, that I cannot ever let the day go without thinking about it.

My childrens’ memories will be different. They will, in the mists held within reflecting imperfectly their childhoods, have snow covered sidewalks and balloons adorning the inside of pyramid shaped Lutheran church. One or two of the hymns will be the same but the rest of the experience will be totally different. Still, what they know of Easter will be their childhood memories-lamb chops and asparagus, Easter egg hunts in the living room and not out at the edge of the fields (with eggs taken from Miss Effie’s chicken coop).

When I was standing in a bookstore reading titles, I saw one that caught my attention. It was something like 30 things you need to know now. One of the 30 things was that you could not by your actions really impact on the behavior of your children. I don’t really agree in total, but I understand what the author meant. Genetics really means a great deal in the formation of personality. Right out of the box so to speak both of my children were different, really different. But some things that I have done I am sure have moderated some bad traits and encouraged a few good ones in the boys. Some things have had no effect that I can discern. Still just as my parents love of the 500-mile road that rolled across the Carolinas has impacted my love of travel, I am sure that my somewhat dogmatic (there is right and there is wrong) values have found their way into at least one of the boys’ heads. Enough of this, the evening wanes.

I have decided that when I am writing for this blog I will try and make sure that there is something more than my writing involved. It could be a link to a website I like, or an image or an audio clip. Today I went with the image. Night fall here in the western fringe of the Eastern Time zone has an austere beauty. On a cold day the shades of blue as the evening descends are just transcendent. When I lived on the east coast the sky very often seemed fire filled as the day ended. I had one friend who works in the Environmental Quality division of the government tell me that was because of pollution. Well anyway I digress. So, here is a shot of the western sky on a cool evening Easter Sunday 2008.