Then April came in like a T-rex and ate the lion.
I knew this was a stinker of a snow fall when I went out to shovel the front steps. I stepped out of my back door into the fresh snow fall and my feet didn't sink into the snow. It was such a wet, heavy snowfall that it packed itself down. That eight inches was so wet that if it had been a fluffy fall, it would have easily been a new foot of snow. It took awhile to shovel off the deck and the front steps. Jay had to go get more gas for the blower but eventually he cleared the driveway and front walk. The sun is high enough in the sky so the snow began to melt again almost immediately but I still shoveled off the roof. I wasn't going to risk ice dams just because it's April.
The poor ice rink across the street disappeared beneath the snow a month ago. They had even removed the hockey boards last week; now the park is just a flat field of snow. Spring will win out in the end but BOY this winter is putting up a good fight.
A week ago, I packed my bag and headed to Tyler and Megan's place. They were heading to Vegas for a short vacation to celebrate Ty's 40th birthday, which actually was at Christmas time. They were both way too busy to leave town then so they pushed his birthday trip to spring break. I had fun with the grandkids and I hope they had fun with me. The weather was terrible but we did get outside at least once while the kids all rode their bikes on the huge driveway. Xena and Babalouie even hiked through the snow to jump on the trampoline for awhile. Kitten tried to follow them down to the tramp but she was wearing crocs, so three steps into the deep snow, she turned around, saying "nope. this is not gonna work." she went in to find some boots but by the time she came out, her brother and sister had given up bouncing on the nearly frozen tramp. We played with the dogs for a while, then went back inside.
We celebrated Babalouie's 9th birthday while I was there. It's hard to believe he's nine. Seems like just yesterday that I headed down to Texas, ready to spend 6 months if necessary to take care of Xena and Ty because Megan was so sick. After 45 days in the hospital, they finally got her hyperemesis gravidarum under control and she was able to come home and actually function fairly well. In the end, I spent one month in Texas before Jay joined us. He and I drove home together. Nine years ago.
Babalouie told me exactly what kind of cake he wanted, so I baked it for him. It was pretty easy: Chocolate cake with fudge frosting. It was as good as that sounds. He had promised his parents to save them a piece of cake but it was a close run thing.
I don't usually do birthday presents but my niece Meg was moving and she had a sale and Meg is a huge fan of Legos. She had several sets she hadn't even had a chance to open yet. I bought those for Babalouie, as he is also a fan of Legos. He was thrilled with the gifts and spent the bulk of the time I was there meticulously building these:
While he built his Star Wars/Marvel creations, his sisters and I did puzzles. Xena is a jigsaw aficionado.
After my three days and nights with that bunch of grandkids, I got to hang with #6 for a few hours on Thursday. At 5 months, she's rolling across the floor and army crawling to anything that catches her fancy. She can get up on her hands and knees but hasn't quite figured out how to become mobile that way. She's not a fan of hard wood floors: too slippery to get anywhere.
I didn't get to spend any time with BoopityBoop these last two weeks. Katie is out of town and their other grandma is staying with them. I'm sure they all had a blast. Katie has been in Ireland with Josie, touring the country as fans of a local rugby league. Any excuse to tour the Emerald Isle is a good excuse.
It's just as well I didn't get to see the twins: spending four straight days playing with the other grand kids was enough to knock me into a coma every night.
Then on Friday, I went to lunch at my Mom's because my cousin S was in town. S retired a few years ago and moved to Italy! She lives in a gorgeous little mountain town about an hour by train from Venice. She comes to the states every once in awhile and she loves to have visitors but the pandemic made both of those things nearly impossible for the past few years. Her sister, my cousin A, still lives in town so we do get to see each other occasionally but it's always good to get together when we can. There were 9 of us at lunch at Mom's place and we had a really good time.
Easter is next week and I've done nothing to prepare (except Lent stuff). When we were growing up, our Easter tradition was almost as exciting as Christmas. Mom and Dad usually made us give up candy for Lent and if we could do it, we'd get a box of Fanny Farmer Candy when it was over. If we couldn't do it (we could never do it), we still got huge Easter baskets featuring Fanny Farmer chocolate bunnies. I miss FF candy. No one, not even Godiva, does Easter bunnies as well as Fanny Farmer did and their jelly beans were unparalleled.
In addition to baskets was of course, dying eggs on Saturday. Because there were so many of us, we used to dye 5 or 6 dozen eggs. You'd think 60 or 70 hard boiled eggs would be too many to eat but you'd be wrong. With 11 members of the family, all of whom love egg salad and deviled eggs, those dyed eggs were usually gone in a week. The egg hunt on Easter Morning was cut throat. Many tears were shed over the years (mostly by Andy) over who won the hunt. We were all way too competitive for the egg hunt to just be about the fun of finding eggs; it was always about finding more than anyone else. There were years when my Mom tried to make it less competitive. Once, she put our initials on eggs and we were only allowed to collect those eggs designated for us but of course then it just turned into a race to see who could find their own eggs fastest. Once again, Andy was reduced to tears because Billy lied (on Easter Sunday!!) and told him the egg up on the mantle had Joe's initials on it. Yes, for a whole lot of us, Easter isn't Easter unless Andy's crying.
Easter also meant new clothes. Back in the olden days, most of us got our clothes from the Sears catalogue but not our Easter duds! I remember actually going shopping with my Mom for Easter. It was the one time a year we got to pick out good, fancy, church going clothes. I still have a soft place in my heart and memory for a few of my Easter outfits. The two I remember most were when I was 5 and Mom made matching pale blue linen dresses for herself, me and my sister Margy, who was 2. The three dresses were identical except for the tiny flower appliques she put at the top of the three pleats that ran across the front. Margy's dress had daisies, mine had pink roses and I don't remember what Mom's had. I didn't notice at the time that Mom was pregnant. My brother Bill was born about a month after Easter that year. The other Easter outfit I remember most fondly was a pair of bib fronted palazzo pants when I was in 7th grade. It was the early 70s and the wider your pants, the cooler you were.
We got new clothes at Easter for a few reasons: in a family as large as ours, you'd spend all your time shopping if you didn't limit it to a few special times. Easter is when we got what would be our good clothes for the year. Easter was a good time to do that because the best part of the day was fancy.
That's right, the egg hunt and even the Easter Basket full of Fanny Farmer candy paled in comparison to the highlight of our Easter, which was
Open Buffet Brunch at Minneapolis Golf Club.
My dad had been a member of MGC since before he met my mom. He was an avid golfer his whole life and Mom even took up the game and became good enough to win the Ladies' Nine Hole Chamionship one year. After she took that trophy, I think she sort of retired from the game, as she had other things she'd rather do. We all learned to golf at MGC but the pool was where we spent most of our time. Mom and Dad had dinner with friends at the Club fairly often but we kids were almost never invited up to the club house. It was a special occasion when we were allowed to order lunch from the concession stand at the pool. We were rich enough to belong to the club but not rich enough to eat there very often. Most summer afternoons, we headed to the pool right after lunch and stayed till it was time to go home and have dinner. Perfect summer day! I remember once, when Joe and I had swimming lessons in the morning, Dad dropped us at the pool and gave us $5.00 to buy lunch. That was back when the concession stand still took cash. WE didn't buy lunch. Instead, every hour on the hour, we bought candy. Nutgoodies, hershey bars and m&ms. When you're 8 and 10 years old, that kind of diet will keep you pretty happy for a day.
I digress.
Easter Brunch.
Easter Brunch was the one time all year that we ate, as a family, a meal together at the club.
MGC's Easter Brunch was like a spread right out of Heaven.
Everything from eggs benedict to smoked oysters to honey baked ham to prime rib was available at the buffet. There was an omelet station where you could custom order anything, and I mean anything for your omelet. There were warming dishes with sausages (links or patties, whatever you prefer) and mountains of bacon too high to see over. There were fresh fruit platters that stretched as far as the eye could see. Fruit I'd never even heard of before (kiwi) was available at the Easter Buffet. Every kind of breakfast food imaginable, including pyramids of those mini boxes of cereal you used to be able to buy and pitchers of ice cold milk for little kids who didn't like real food.
And don't even get me started on the treats table. You like coffee cake? You like donuts? You like chocolate covered long johns, eclairs, glazed twisties, donut holes, you like your pastries raised, glazed or cake? you like pie? Fruit pie, cream pie, merengue? Cake? Chocolate cake, carrot cake, lemon bars and trays of cookies. They had it all.
Like the high dive and the baby pool, the Easter Buffet has vanished into the mists of time. MGC probably does something nice on Easter but it's nothing like the glory days of the 60s and 70s. We stopped going as a family on Easter by the mid 80s when we were growing up and getting married and bringing grand kids along but by then the Easter spread was a pale shadow of its formerly gluttonous self.
Since my own kids are all grown up, I haven't dyed an egg in years. Maybe we'll do that next weekend. Ty's kids will be in South Dakota for the holiday but BoopityBoop and #6 will be here. I may even go buy some chocolate bunnies but the last time I bought myself a new Easter outfit was in February of 2020 and then of course, no one got to see it as even the Churches were closed by Easter.
But Easter isn't about the clothes or the eggs or the candy. Jesus rose, death is defeated and the gates of Heaven were kicked open to us all!
That's worth celebrating no matter how you do it.