Easter memories......
The year was 1961. It was Easter Sunday. I was eleven years old and it was my birthday. I had waited my whole life for this special Easter. You see, I was an Easter baby-born on Easter Sunday. Everyone had always told me that my birthday would only be on Easter every eleven years. This was the year! I was beside myself with excitement.
As my sisters and I hurried to get into our Easter outfits for the short walk across an open field to the little country church, the telephone rang. Dad answered, and when he hung up the phone, he yelled for all of us to come to the living room. What he told us shook my eleven-year-old world. He had just talked to the head of Village Missions and in a few weeks we would leave Kent, Oregon, forever. He was being sent to a place in Washington state called Olalla. We were moving! My world crumbled and I burst into tears.
Just four years before we had left our home state of Minnesota and had made what seemed like an endless drive across the northern states to a place we knew by name only, Kent, Oregon. The tiny town sat on a broad plain among wheat fields and cattle ranches. An occasional canyon sliced into the landscape and majestic snowcapped mountains surrounded us in the distance. We knew all their names: Mt. Hood, Mt. Jefferson, the Three Sisters and others. My sisters and I quickly settled into life in rural Oregon. We attended the small elementary school where grades 1-8 were housed in a three room schoolhouse with three teachers. We made friends. The town (population 60) was our playground. We watched huge herds of sheep or cattle herded down the dirt road in front of our house. We saw them branding cattle in the corral across from our house. We breathed the dust of the huge trucks that brought wheat to the grain elevators that shaded our tiny house. We thought we would live there forever. We never imaged leaving this place.
Later that Easter morning I sat between my two best friends, Patty and Colleen, in the front row at the Easter service. Silent tears rolled down my cheeks as my father announced to the little congregation that we were leaving.
In some ways that was the end of childhood for me. I would never again wait with such joy for something to happen. I now knew that disappointment was a possibility in every situation.
So the on year I turned twenty-two, when my birthday should have been on Easter again, it didn’t happen. Easter and my birthday did not coincide. I was disappointed, but not devastated. I still am not sure what happened. Either the people who told me the every eleven years rule were mistaken, or the people in charge of setting Easter dates changed how they figured it.
The year I was turning 31, there was another unexpected Easter joy. My first child, Tom, was born ten days late on Easter Sunday. His birthday is often very close to Easter although not on Easter. A quick google search told me that my birthday will finally be on Easter in 2022. But Tom’s will not be on Easter until 2042.
As my sisters and I hurried to get into our Easter outfits for the short walk across an open field to the little country church, the telephone rang. Dad answered, and when he hung up the phone, he yelled for all of us to come to the living room. What he told us shook my eleven-year-old world. He had just talked to the head of Village Missions and in a few weeks we would leave Kent, Oregon, forever. He was being sent to a place in Washington state called Olalla. We were moving! My world crumbled and I burst into tears.
Just four years before we had left our home state of Minnesota and had made what seemed like an endless drive across the northern states to a place we knew by name only, Kent, Oregon. The tiny town sat on a broad plain among wheat fields and cattle ranches. An occasional canyon sliced into the landscape and majestic snowcapped mountains surrounded us in the distance. We knew all their names: Mt. Hood, Mt. Jefferson, the Three Sisters and others. My sisters and I quickly settled into life in rural Oregon. We attended the small elementary school where grades 1-8 were housed in a three room schoolhouse with three teachers. We made friends. The town (population 60) was our playground. We watched huge herds of sheep or cattle herded down the dirt road in front of our house. We saw them branding cattle in the corral across from our house. We breathed the dust of the huge trucks that brought wheat to the grain elevators that shaded our tiny house. We thought we would live there forever. We never imaged leaving this place.
Later that Easter morning I sat between my two best friends, Patty and Colleen, in the front row at the Easter service. Silent tears rolled down my cheeks as my father announced to the little congregation that we were leaving.
In some ways that was the end of childhood for me. I would never again wait with such joy for something to happen. I now knew that disappointment was a possibility in every situation.
So the on year I turned twenty-two, when my birthday should have been on Easter again, it didn’t happen. Easter and my birthday did not coincide. I was disappointed, but not devastated. I still am not sure what happened. Either the people who told me the every eleven years rule were mistaken, or the people in charge of setting Easter dates changed how they figured it.
The year I was turning 31, there was another unexpected Easter joy. My first child, Tom, was born ten days late on Easter Sunday. His birthday is often very close to Easter although not on Easter. A quick google search told me that my birthday will finally be on Easter in 2022. But Tom’s will not be on Easter until 2042.