Of Bunnies and Beans

With the coming of Easter tomorrow, I had a flashback of yesteryear earlier this week which made me smile and remember, as most people my age say, an easier time.

In my house, it was something to look forward to. The Easter Bunny (EB for short) was about to arrive and my siblings and I would plot on how we were going to find all of the hidden treasures and somehow avoid eating egg salad sandwiches for the next month. The season of egg hunting would always begin a few days before the main event with the ritual of dying the eggs.

Back then, things were tight in the house but my parents would always find a way to get the requirements for the egg transformation ceremony. We would rarely see the fancy PAAS fashions on our hard boiled wonders,  but thinking back, I am not sure we really gave a flying snoot about having cheap stickers ruin our works of art. Of course my mom would lay out the dyes in separate bowls, make sure that the water-vinegar ratio was correct and then would finally warn us not to make eggs that were colored so badly that the EB wouldn't use them.

So there we were huddled around the kitchen table with our little oval canvases in hand. The first to be done had our name on it, not sure even to this day why this was but who am I to question the powers that be. Most of the time each of us would choose to be a solid color, usually green or blue but after our namesake was finished, no holds barred. We would experiment with dipping one end in one color and then the other side in a different hue. One of us would drop the egg during this process and end up with a polychromatic combination that was close to purple charcoal on one side and some kind of puke green on the other.

Once that warm-up even was completed, then we were prepared for such a hunt that Elmer Fudd would have been proud. Me and my siblings would wait to about 5:30 in the morning or so and stake out the house, making a mental treasure map all along the way. We made sure that we noted where the plastic eggs were and the locations of the hard boiled ones. For what ever reason, the EB had an endless supply of plastic eggs (that were filled with candy and sometimes even pennies and nickels) but needed hard boiled ones from us to hide. However, when you are 7, things like this do not bother you as much as trying to locate as many treasures as possible when the house is too dark to see clearly.

Around 6:00 or so, my parents would come out and then FORCE us to have orange juice before the hunt was to begin. Even today I am not sure if it was the joy of seeing us fidget or the need to get us something in our systems before the sugar onslaught. So there we were back at the table not really paying attention to what we were drinking, we just wanted to make sure that our mental maps were still accurate through the use of quick glances. Finally, we were released and the game was afoot.

One sibling of mine was the miser of the group and would scramble around looking for the plastic ones that had the change in it. Upon spotting one, he would give it a cursory shake and if it sounded like candy, he would ditch it quickly and move on to the next. Later on, he discovered that if he kept the candy, he could barter it for pennies. My dad of course delighted in sitting on the couch and giving up hints as we looked around. He was partial to the "hot and cold" method whenever we were near a hard-boiled egg. Maybe he did not realize that those eggs were not as valuable in the opinion of us egg hunters, so in desperate attempt to keep him quiet for a bit, we would reluctantly put the egg he was hinting towards, which we had known about since 5:37 that morning, into our basket.

Finally, after 15 minutes or so of hard work, we would compare our stashes and delight at the fact that the EB had left us Easter baskets with treats inside of them. I always knew which one was mine since at a young age I was sensitive to chocolate and somehow the EB instinctively knew to get me a white chocolate bunny. Usually there was a good assortment of chocolate-marshmallow bunnies, some peeps, those malted eggs that never tasted right, and of course jelly beans. I was always careful to ration out my swag for I knew that it had to last me longer than a few days for nothing was better then to grin and eat a peep when your sibling looks on with mournful eyes.

So there I was the other day, musing over something that happened well over thirty five years ago and still remember it like it was last week. Wanting to recapture some of that feeling, I decided that what I really wanted and not had for a very long time was jelly beans. I grabbed my car keys and headed over to the local Walmart to begin a different kind of hunt. I first saw the PAAS display and almost lost my lunch seeing how much a simple kit costs. Never mind the ones showing egg monsters and fish. I was on a mission and could not be distracted by going on a rant about wondering what monster and fish eggs have to do with Easter.

My worst shock of the day was not being able to find normal jelly beans. I found beans made out of that chewy gummi stuff. Then there were the beans that looked like the jelly type but were labeled spicy. That mad my stomach roll a few times remembering what happened the last time I ate something spicy. On another shelf I located a bag of sour beans and wonder what twisted Willy Wonka came up with these candies. Oh, and I shouldn't leave out that I did find a few bags of jelly bellys but who in the hell wants to pay that much for something that does not really taste like a $.99 bag of jelly beans should.

I left disgusted having failed on my mission but smiled once again as I remembered my family. See, back then we did not worry about the 10,000 flavors of jelly beans. Nor did we care that we were eating a hard boiled egg that had been sitting outside of the refrigerator for about six hours. We had not a thought about the fact that we were using the same baskets from last year that did not have stuffed animals or some useless plastic toy in them. No, all we knew is that we were having a blast and it was a time for the entire family to be together.

Monday, I think I will go to Target and see what they have on the clearance counter...

-WTS