Easter Sunday

I hadn't stuffed Easter baskets before the kids got up. Bad Mom. Furthermore, I discovered that the Easter baskets themselves, the wicker ones with the handpainted bunnies the kids have used every single Easter of their candy-eating lives, were NOT in the basement where I thought they were, but in the attic, where I can't get them myself (having been banned from the attic after falling out of the stairless attic opening.) I'm having sort of holiday burn-out, having made elaborate holiday celebrations for the kids over the years and now having an attack of "aren't you too old for this (because I'm certainly tired of doing it.)" Anyway, it was Easter Sunday and I had one of the kids awake (Audrey slept in,) a big bag of candy, and no Easter baskets. So I grabbed a couple of new black photo boxes I had hanging around and we had EASTER boxes. I don't think it will catch on, but it got me off the hook for this year:



There's also kind of a convoluted story about the weather forecast over Easter weekend. It wasn't supposed to rain until Sunday afternoon (as in the weathermen on all networks agreed that you needed to have your egg hunts early in the day because it was going to rain almost precisely after lunch.) That's what the forecast had said, and leading up to Easter weekend we had had some of the most amazing sunny warm weather imaginable. We almost hit 80 degrees on Good Friday and someone told me were having "Arizona Weather," I refrained from snorting and bursting out into impolite laughter, but only barely (anything under 90 isn't "Arizona Weather"----what was he thinking?) Anyway, Audrey and I had planned an elaborate family picnic up to Rainbow Falls State Park with the dogs for Easter Saturday, and it RAINED. Not piddley little "Northwest Sunshine"-type rain where you just carry on with your business, but real duck-drowning RAIN. Then on Easter, when we were supposed to have rain, it was nice, so we threw the family, the dogs and the picnic supplies in the car and took off. As we approached our destination, it starts to RAIN. Then it even HAILS a bit. We get there, and it STOPS, just like that. No sun-break, but a lovely, overcast, non-rainy afternoon with a pleasant temperature. We got out of the car, leashed-up the dogs and took off for a hike, and everything was going really well, until we got a ways up the trail and ran into:



Trees. Trees that were not standing up like trees are supposed to, but trees that were uprooted and lying across the trail in great numbers. I don't know what sort of weather disaster they had since we had been up there last summer, but it was something. It was amazing. The trail just disapppeared and there was nothing but an obstacle course of downed trees. We would climb over a bunch and find a piece of trail and run into more trees. It was work getting through there! Fun, too, in a gee-isn't-this-kind-of-unusual sort of way, but work! Please note that we entered the trail in the state park in the usual fashion and hadn't come across any "trail closed" or "proceed with caution" signs or anything to indicate it was going to be more than a typical easy 1.2 mile walk.



But it was nice. It was good exercise, the woods were beautiful, it had stopped raining, the dogs had a ball crashing through the underbrush, and we had a nice picnic lunch over by the campground and went home (it started raining as soon as we got in the car.) I share with you:



Trillium. A common wild flower this time of year, and in my opinion, as lovely as any Easter Lily, and more appropriate, too, with it's three petals and groups of three leaves in a God-the-Father/God-the-Son/and God-the-Holy-Ghost sort of Holy Trinity way. There are definitely worse ways to spend Easter afternoon.