“Easter”
By Gerry Niskern

How is your family spending Easter this year? Will you be taking a spring break trip? Will you have a big family reunion? Or is your family shopping for Easter outfits for Easter church service?
When I think of Easter Sunday different images come to mind. I remember a particular Sunday at the little country church back east that our family attended when I was a child.
Easter was early that year. Gusts of spring wind pushed the worshippers up the steep hill as we clutched armloads of flowers from our yards and nearby woods. Soon the sanctuary was filled with green and blue canning jars containing iris, tulips, lilacs and daises from the fields.
There were farmers in carefully brushed dark suits. Their wives wore cotton print dresses and sturdy shoes. Little girls in new Easter dresses sewn from the latest calico feed sacks came next. Big boys in clean overalls, wet hair slicked back from sun burned faces shuffled in last.
As I took my place on the front pew with the other children, I prayed that no one would notice the hat. It was my new pink straw sailor hat. Along with a turned up brim it had a large pink wooden bead on the top that secured the ribbon that tied under my chin. No such luck! The finger pointing and grins on the other kids faces told me the hat had been noticed. It would be putting it mildly to say I hated that hat, but my Mother operated on the premise that “if she didn’t have new Easter outfits when she was a child, by golly, her girls were going to.
When the church service was over and the Doxology had been sung, the adults gathered in small groups outside to discuss the prospects of a good spring rain. We kids usually played hide and seek among the tombstones in the side yard. When a friend, one of the little farm girls, asked to try my hat on, I willing obliged. Just as she reached out to take it, a strong gust of wind whipped it from my hand. The pink straw went spiraling down the hill. We raced to the wall in time to see it skip under the wheels of a dairy truck passing on RR #2.
When I went to bed that night and knelt to say my prayers, I added something extra. “Thank you, for our good Easter day, and especially for the fine wind!”