Easter has long been one of my most decorated holidays. Mama’s love for it spilled over onto me, and how could it not?
Every Easter Sunday that I can remember, Daddy dusted off his old Kodak camera while Mama frantically arranged her four boys in front of the red toile draperies of our childhood — Richard, John, Tony and me all clad in our Easter clothes she carefully selected from the Casey’s Department Store downtown. I can still hear Mr. Benny and his wife, Mrs. Evelyn, welcoming Mama through the double glass doors. “Come on in, Lou, and little David, we have just the thing for you.”
Mama could always be persuaded to purchase the fashions they “just got in” every time, but she held fast to her rule that her boys must wear coordinating shades of blue. White patent dress shoes with laces, flared bottom plaid trousers, and fancy blue shirts wrapped in delicate tissue secured with the tiniest of little silver pins in varying sizes were stuffed into bags. Mama never looked at the price, only signed “Mary Lou Creel” on the ticket for my daddy to worry about later.
I have the old photographs to prove it. We all stood near the window with her oak china cabinet to the right, holding our Easter baskets which looked a lot like the ones on the top shelf I had spotted earlier that week at the TWL. Giant chocolate Easter rabbits bought forced smiles for the camera. We didn’t know then that all these years later, the memory of those Easters would make our hearts smile even bigger. The only thing missing is the photographer and set director, known as Daddy and Mama to us.
I wish I could sit up tall like I did when I could barely reach the yellow Formica countertops in our kitchen, impatiently excited as Mama fixed the Easter egg dye in Daddy’s old coffee cups. I remember the little box so vividly, the colored tablets that dissolved into warm water and vinegar right before our very eyes, and the little wire egg dipper that never quite functioned well enough for Mama. She used her fingers to lift the eggs in and out of the rainbow medley of colored wonder.
Mama’s fingers were the strangest of colors as we sat on the church pew with her carefully hiding them behind a handbag or book of hymns, but her boys and their home were decorated as lovely and lovingly on those holidays as she and Daddy are in my mind this Easter.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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