Growing up in Michigan, Easter almost always arrived during the first full blush of spring. Our side garden would be alive with daffodils and pastel tulips; our Easter outfits were worn with light jackets and dress shoes. That is decidedly not the case here on the Northern Plains.
We’ve had multiple Easter blizzards during my decade on the ranch, and unless it’s a drought year, no one is surprised when the big annual Easter egg hunt in town gets moved inside because there’s too much snow on the ground. Here, if you want to show off your fancy dress shoes at Sunday services, you usually need to wear winter boots and change in the mudroom at church.
The connections between the suburban Easter traditions of my youth and the first weeks of warm weather were so obvious to my child self that I barely even noticed them. Of course, Easter decorations featured spring flowers, and Easter dresses were short-sleeved. Of course, the colored cellophane “grass” in our Easter baskets was a brilliant emerald green. In southern Michigan, outdoor Easter hunts were only canceled on account of rain.
It wasn’t until I had chickens of my own that I began to understand some of the other, more agricultural associations. Hens start laying more frequently with the return of longer days, so the spring equinox is when we usually expect our egg supply to shift from a trickle to a steady stream. When the kids were smaller, they’d go out with a small wicker basket to collect eggs from the coop. It never ceased to tickle me that it looked like they were carrying an Easter basket when they returned, right down to the multi-colored eggs nestled therein, as we selected our hens for color variety.
The themes of rebirth, renewal, and new life that are part of Easter traditions are even more relevant when you make your living working in agriculture, and they feel especially poignant after the kind of epically long, harsh winters we regularly experience here. However, a spring that has not sprung when Easter arrives is, well, often a pretty big bummer. I’ll admit, I miss the mild Easters of my childhood.
As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, this winter was eerily warm, but sure enough, this weekend, the aforementioned annual Easter egg hunt in town arrived the morning after an epic spring blizzard. The storm left behind a foot of sloppy, wet snow, and the roads weren’t even fully plowed by the time the hunt was supposed to begin. The kids were sad, but as influenza had been marching through our ranks, they wouldn’t have been able to go even if it had been more appropriate Easter egg hunt weather.
Meanwhile, as I also wrote a few weeks ago, we are thankful for any moisture after such a dry winter. So, it wasn’t just my kids who were fine with having a white Easter. Even my husband, who was battling influenza himself (while also calving in a storm), was thankful. As crazy as it might sound, that storm could mean the difference between having hay to cut in June and not having hay to cut at all. A well-timed precipitation event can make that big a difference for the whole year.
But, waking on Easter morning to a yard full of birds singing, the smell of wet mud from the snow melting, the whole prairie singing a hymn of thanksgiving — and everyone finally mostly healthy — was joyful indeed. The man of the ranch felt well enough to joke: “See, we do get April showers here; they are just the white kind.” I could relax and rejoice as well.
And looking out across the yard, as the snow began to melt back around the edges of the gravel road, a little Easter surprise appeared — the grass revealed was every bit as bright and green as the cellophane from my childhood Easter baskets, a funny little wink reminding me that I am not as far from where I started as I sometimes think…
