When I was a little girl, living on the banks of the Great Kootenai River in Montana, our Easter was not like it is now. We did not have a church. There was a preacher who came sometimes to our little town, but sometimes he didn’t come for months and months. And he never came at Easter. I guess he was busy.
And you couldn’t buy Easter egg colors. Sometimes we would boil some plants to make color, beets for red and dandelion greens for a dull green. Sometimes if there was food color, we could color the eggs. But mostly we had white eggs and brown eggs.
My Mother – who turned out to be Grammy – used to do a wonderful thing with the eggs we had. She would take white eggs and brown eggs, wash them carefully and then make holes in the ends with an ice pick and carefully blow out the insides of the eggs. Then Grammy would take paraffin – which is the white wax that seals jars of canned food – and a very thin wire, and build the neck of a beautiful swan. Her swan egg was much prettier than my drawing here. It had eyes made from teeny glass beads. She used brown eggs to
make Native American people. I loved those eggs. We kept them a long, long time
THESE PICTURES ABOVE WERE TAKEN around the bend of the river at my Montana home,
I don’t have many pictures with my Mommy and Daddy so this one is special to me. This one was taken in our garden. My Mother made the pretty little Easter Bonnet and coat for me, and we were all dressed up, even though Grammy was sitting on a box, and our feet were in the mud. There was nowhere to go, but everyone got dressed up for Easter pictures. I was 18 months old. My mother was 19 and my father was 25
All of the old home place is gone now, buried deep under the waters of KooCanUsa Dam. I can’t go home again, but I want the children to remember. I want to remember. Happy Easter!
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