I wrote the following essay in April, 1995 for “Meandering”, a bi-weekly column that I used to write for a farm newspaper, The Farmer’s Friend. This year Easter is late, and there are more signs of spring than usual, but here on our farm, we are just between crocuses and daffodils on nature’s calendar, and temperatures yoyo from the 30’s to 70’s so I still stand by what I wrote almost thirty years ago.
There are places where Easter is celebrated amidst riotous colors, where the grass is a rich shade of green, where flowers bloom—lemony daffodils, rose-hued azaleas, tulips dripping red, orange, purple.
Here in northeastern Pennsylvania though, you can color Easter in shades of chocolate, from the bare-boned trees and the muddy roads to murky, just-thawed ponds and skittish beige deer.
The skies you can color changeable at this time of the year. Depending on a whim they can be variations of gray, robin’s egg blue, or lily white. Streak them with a hazy rainbow after a shower; strew them with clouds—cumulus, stratus, cirrus, nimbus. Be sure to make the clouds’ shapes interesting—form them into a goat’s head or a set of angel’s wings.
From your palette select pastels: amber for the stubble-strewn fields, shades of pink and mauve for the far-off forests—colors that hint of things to come. Touches of apple green should spike out here and there, pale, barely-touched-with-chlorophyll green.
In other places Easter is heralded with trumpet fanfares and 100-voice choirs echoing alleluias. In the hills and valleys of Pennsylvania the quiet colors are complemented with the muted music of geese honking overhead, with the robins singing their odes to spring, and with the spring peepers’ joyful fanfare. The sounds of wind and rain add to the northeastern concerto: whispering, bellowing, shrieking wind along with rain percussing—pattering, drumming, pounding a steady beat.
Easter temperatures in other places will be in the 70s or 80s, and people might wear sun dresses and short-sleeved shirts as they bask in the sun’s early glow at sunrise services. Easter temperatures here may be in the 20s, and we might wear our winter coats and gloves as we hunt for Easter eggs in 12 inches of snow!
There are many who prefer to flee south for Easter—to celebrate this holiday where flowers bloom, and skies are always sunny.
For those of us who stay here, spring is still but a promise—one last snowstorm and a hopeful daffodil away. Never mind what the calendar says, the physical evidence is sometimes mighty slim. For hardy northerners, spring is still something to be hoped for, something to have faith in.
I believe that our less-than-stellar days seem somehow appropriate at Easter-time. Faith, hope, a promise—isn’t that what Easter is about anyway?
Peace to you, and thank you for reading this!
