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From Pipi’s Pasture: Easter Memories

Diane Prather
Diane Prather
Diane_Prather

First of all this week, a note about the next Country School Reunion meeting: it will be held at 1 p.m. April 24 at the Wyman Living History Museum. You may recall that last week’s column featured a story about the Country School Reunion being planned for this June. I think I forgot to put the time for the April meeting.

When I think about this year’s upcoming Easter holiday, I can’t help but marvel at how quickly the years have passed. Our sons grew up a while ago, and now our grandchildren have grown up, too. So, I doubt that we will have an Easter egg hunt at Pipi’s Pasture this year, but there have been lots of them out here in years past and oh, what memories we have!

When our sons, Jody and Jamie, were young we lived at Severance, near Greeley. The boys colored eight to 10 dozen eggs, and the weather was usually good enough to have a big Easter egg hunt in our yard. I was a high school teacher then, and Easter sometimes fell around prom time so I can remember coming home from the event, and if I had enough outdoor light, I hid the eggs before I went to bed. Jody’s dog, Benji, went along with me as I hid the eggs, hung baskets in the trees and made little nests of goodies that I tucked into tree trunks and corners of the yard.



On Easter morning, Benji was out with the boys. He often remembered where eggs were hidden, and if the boys weren’t fast enough, he found and ate them, shells and all.

Years passed, and along came the grandchildren. Since they were toddlers, the kids have spent Easters with Grandpa and Grandma. We have lived in a couple of places, but the Easter egg hunts I remember most were out here at Pipi’s Pasture. After their Easter egg hunt at home, the families came out to our house where they hunted around 100 eggs — all plastic and filled with candies, gum and coins. The kids figured out the usual hiding places — the patio, trees, along the fences, in the parked tractors and machinery, under feed pans, and, of course, in the haystack.



Grandpa and I tied bags of treats onto tree branches of the old apple tree at the garden, trees that border Pipi’s Pasture and the big evergreens and poplars in the front yard.

The last stop was the shop where the baskets were hidden. In bad weather, eggs were also hidden in the shop. Grandpa cleaned up the black dust left on everything in the shop after months of running the coal stoker, and he swept the floor. He worried about the dusty shop, but the kids never seemed to notice. They just hunted through shelves, bins of tools, and in corners where shovels, rakes and hoes were stored.

Oh, the memories!


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