Spring

I'm not yet ready to deal with or explain how summer as we know it has been cancelled (maybe tonight), so instead let's focus on how the heck pagans / non-believers / just folk are supposed to spend Easter, the one day of the year when I actually could go shopping because there's nothing else to do, but all the shopping is closed. (The convenient old term "pagans" used to be a catch-all for non-Christian, but has kinda been appropriated over the last couple decades to mean modern folk who actually believe in wood-sprites, talking furniture, or that the stars really do tell your future but the newspaper astrologers never get it right. "Non-believers" has the same exclusionary feel as "non-white" would. So I don't know quite how to represent a complete and utter lack of faith, at least on my part, and it leaves us hard-pressed to explain what some of the fuss is about. Good Friday, in particular, completely eluded explanation when the girls asked.)

So, we focused on the Spring elements of this holiday, and here's what we did: begged off an Easter meal with my mother because I just didn't want to have to be anywhere this weekend. (Or any weekend, for that matter.) Got up and checked out the Easter baskets -- the rabbit brings a little bit of candy and a little bit of summer clothing. For me, the rabbit brings malted chocolate eggs. Had oatmeal for breakfast. Watched the end of "Spider-Man" from the night before. Dyed Easter eggs, which, because I am a bad parent, we had never done before. Had a general breakdown around the dying of Easter eggs, which reminded me why we hadn't done it before. Sang along to "American Pie," the girls' current favorite song, and changed the refrain to "This'll be the day that I dye." (Which was true.) Then Lee hid plastic eggs around the yard for the girls to find. Then the girls hid the eggs again for each other. Then they made us lunch, which was very sweet. I made some genuine hot cocoa from scratch (because why the f is there corn syrup in those mixes? Jeez), dumped it into the Nuclear Thermos, and off we went for a back-road trip past the buffalo farm and down to Nutten Hook, a nice little spot along the river where I have some history (professional, not personal), and took a hike up to the old ice house. Once there were more than 70 ice houses along the Hudson River. There's hardly even a sign of any of them any more. This site has the outer walls of the power house that they used to run machinery, and the chimney of the power house, and then just the foundation of what was a massive ice warehouse. I'll post some pictures here later on. Lovely little hike. Lots of wildflowers in bloom. We could hear turkeys but couldn't see them. Bekah found a lovely piece of granite encrusted with quartz crystals, mostly quite tiny but very shiny (once I scrubbed several eons of Hudson River mud off them). We drank the hot chocolate along the river and generally had a lovely afternoon.

See? Just telling that made me feel a little better about summer being cancelled. (Well, not much better.)