It Was a Good Day

Yesterday was a day when even the mundane felt miraculous. I guess that's appropriate, given my Christian upbringing. But it wouldn't describe it as a particularly spiritual sensation. Simply put, after a year in which every special occasion in our household felt wrong to a degree -- birthdays, Halloween, Christmas -- I was astonished to make it through Easter with barely a hint of the turmoil that has turned my life upside down since my mother's fall last February.

Yes, I did have to help my dad get her to bed this evening. Everything went as smoothly as possible, though. And, yes, there were moments when the new realities of our nuclear family intruded. Still, there was never that sense that one of us was completely elsewhere. Despite the worst allergies of the year, I managed to participate in the festivities without major incident -- antihistamines can make me a bear to deal with -- and Kim made family time her biggest priority throughout the day.

That's probably why I never felt particularly melancholy. While it's true that holiday rituals stir up memories of the way things used to be, the satisfaction of pulling off what Skylar would call a "classic" Easter more than compensated. Four years ago, I wrote an entry for the holiday musing both on how much had changed between Easter, 2004 -- the first one I shared here on Live Journal -- and Easter, 2007, contrasting photos taken on those two occasions:

As it turns out, few of the pre-digital camera images have been scanned. But I can at least share with you a picture of Skylar enjoying a rest with her mother after the hunt in 2004:

That's when this journal was still pretty new. A lot has changed in the interim. More than that, really. Sometimes it feels like everything that matters has metamorphosed. Still, when I looked at this shot from this morning and compared it to the one from three years ago, I realized that my impression of radical transformation overlooks an underlying stability. Skylar is a lot older now, but she is very much the same girl now that she was then:

It's one of the nice things about the holidays -- at least the substance-free sort we celebrate -- that they give the opportunity to believe, at least temporarily, in the expression, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." Next year may well mark the end of our Easter Bunny era, but we've had a longer run than I anticipated when Skylar was five. Here's to you, Long Ears.

Well, it's 2011 and the Easter Bunny still stops by our house. Yes, he leaves books and clothing now and not so much candy. But Skylar enjoys the ritual of hunting for eggs in the morning sunlight as much as she ever did. And so do Kim and I, clearly, since we both did our parts, despite her brutal work schedule and my end-of-semester frenzy, to make sure that the requisite continuity was achieved.

There were changes, of course. The Easter Bunny now likes to leave more eggs in places that Skylar wouldn't have been able to reach a few years back:

But she doesn't seem to mind:

( Click to see the rest. . . )