Easter Sunday

As a child I looked forward to celebrating Easter Sunday each year. The smell of vinegar filled the air as I sat patiently waiting for my grandmother to finish boiling a dozen of the eggs we saved for breakfast. My grandmother was a fairly plump woman in her late fifties. She has curly black hair with streaks of gray that mostly ran along the sides of her head. She was strenuously preparing a Sunday dinner for us to share with our church later that evening. Since I was nine, it was my job to make sure all the Easter eggs were decorated and placed neatly in a straw basket. I loved this job because by the time I was done my hands were different colors and I managed to cover myself from head to toe with all different kinds of stickers. I reached in my grandmothers’ pile of hard boiled eggs and begun to splash them one by one into a pool of color hoping each one would come out nice and bright. When I got down to my last three eggs I splashed them too hard and the pools of color reached out and tapped the walls leaving behind red, yellow, and blue marks. My grandmother turned around, shook her head, and passed me a soapy kitchen towel. I wiped off the walls but I let the color stay on my hands so later on I could show my cousin what a true artist does before church on an Easter Sunday.

When I finished making the eggs nice and pretty I went upstairs to wash up and throw on my Easter dress. My grandmother brought me a light pink one with ruffles even though she knew I absolutely hated dresses. I decided to wear it anyways because if I didn’t my grandmother would drag me to church, sit me in the front row, and have the pastor pray for me. I knew having to experience that would be way more embarrassing than wearing the stupid dress to church. After I reluctantly got dressed I went downstairs and plopped myself on the couch. As I sat I started to swing my legs back and forth because my feet didn’t know they could actually reach the ground yet. My grandmother came out