Easter, My Mother and the Number 7

Saturday 7 April 2012

I can never get past the number 7 …be it on a fence, a date, a clock or page of a book…without at least a passing thought of my Mum!

Born 7 December 1910, I think she was actually a Fairy Princess in sensible clothes!

But the combination of the number 7 and Easter brings out the MemoryBox with the lid wide open!

Mum was an artist prior to her marriage to the young dentist who whisked her away from Sydney to the small Mallee town of Swan Hill (up on the Murray River, border of States Victoria and NSW). She managed to keep drawing and painting a little, but much was expected socially of the local Dentist’s Wife!

However! Easter was her opportunity to get out the paints and brushes! For weeks, Mum would painstakingly paint intricate pictures of Pirates and Fairies and Trains et al on ordinary old hens’ eggs…(I mean the eggs were ordinary, not the chooks…I LOVE chooks)…making them as precious and sought after as those of Fabergé. Even as little kids, my brother, sister and I knew that the Easter Bunny was not all that far away because of the smell of Mum’s paint and the gathering of rose petals! (My dad had to allay my fears though that the Easter Bunny was quite immune to the dreaded rabbit disease Myxomatosis…so prevalent in the Mallee in the 50s!)

Chocolate was secondary at Easter in our home (though we all loved it and scoffed it as fast as we could if it came our way.) Yes…it was the time of the Hunt for the Painted Egg! Who would know at what hour Mum went out on Easter Sunday morning to lay the Rose Petal Trails…but there they were, one each in Red or Pink or Orange! The idea was that you had to follow your trail to a wild part of the yard…perhaps the Orchard or the Grapevines or the Woodyard…and then the trail would stop and you were on your own…to search!

We did eventually get a chocolate egg but nothing ever compared to the excitement and joy of the hunt for the painted one!

How times change! Easter Eggs, the Christian symbol of new life, were only ever given and received on Easter Sunday when I was a child…and many households still hold to that tradition.  But I must confess to reading with great amusement …and here I shall confess my addiction to Twitter…of stories of chocolate flung with youthful abandon anywhere from the week before to weeks after the event!

As I said in my first Blog yesterday…it is up to each one of us to make the most of who we are and what we believe in rather than interfere in the choices of others. Easter is to be celebrated as a Holy occasion for some, and a well-deserved holiday for others; accepting that and other diversities of life within our community can only contribute greatly to its social health.

As I write this on the 7^th day of April, Easter Saturday 2012 and am once again reminded of my beautiful mother, I try very hard to pass on the unending, unsolicited Love that she gave to all those she knew and to all that she accomplished. I hope that my four children will have at least one tenth of the reasons to remember their childhood as I do mine…and now with two granddaughters, one three years old and the other eighteen months I have the opportunity all over again to do my bit.

I cannot paint eggs…but I can make one heck of a cubby house!