The Great Egg Hunt

My family might not have been big on Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, when I was a kid, but as the years went by we did manage to collect an assortment of holiday traditions. For Easter we had two traditions. We'd color eggs the night before and then the next day Mom and Dad would hide them for us. (Although I suspect it was mostly Mom doing the hiding.)

Coloring eggs was always exciting. It was fun to dip the eggs into the cups full of colorful liquid and to pull them out magically changed and beautiful. We'd experiment with double dipping, trying to get rings of color, making our eggs half one color and half another, writing on them with crayon to get white spots, everyway we could think of to exercise our creative sides. There were never enough eggs to satisfy my brother and me.

Sometime the next day, my brother and I would be sent into another room while Mom hid the eggs around the living room. Then we'd be called out to search for them. Since Mom was pretty good at hiding them, this was never particularly easy. Oh, there were always those eggs left pretty much in the open, but there were always those last few eggs that we had to be guided to with broad hints.

And, inevitably, every year Mom would count the eggs and say, "We're missing one!" She never could remember all the places she hid the eggs, so the egg hunt would turn into a family activity, all of us tearing the living room apart to find the lone remaining egg.

We never found it. Not once. The weeks after Easter we always spent speculating on where the last egg was, and why hadn't it gotten smelly yet? Looking back I'm inclined to think that Mom just had questionable counting skills. Or maybe the cat always ate it.

We had an egg hunt today, with the eggs we colored last night. We found all of them. Thank goodness.