The longest Easter Egg Hunt in history.
Hunting Easter Eggs was an annual ritual that I looked forward to each year and I could hardly wait for the time to come. My sisters, Frances and Marylin, would hide the eggs and I would then
spend the rest of the day looking for them. Sometimes they wouldn’t do such a good job hiding them and I would find them fast, thus causing me to beg them to hide them again. In other words, I became a pain. I had to resort to some drastic methods to get my way, tying my sisters to their chairs while there were studying or sometimes just begging Mamma to make them do it. A younger brother had to be very creative and resourceful.
Of course, the first thing that needed to be done was to gather the eggs from the chicken house. Mamma did this because I was afraid to. I wasn’t going to stick my hand under those old hens. They might peck me, or maybe worse could there be a snake under them? Never did hear of it but I was able to create all kinds of images in my mind. So, I just let Mamma do it. When we gathered eggs for coloring, we would get a lot. After all, I thought they were free. It was not unusual to start with two or three dozen at a time.
Now, a day or two before coloring, Mamma would have been at the Common’s Store in Virgil and bought the coloring tablets. There were usually five or six colors. You would put a colored tablet in a cup and pour boiling water over it filling the cup. It would dissolve and create a colored liquid.
Then there was the wax pencil that was included. With this pencil, you could make all kinds of designs and if you knew how to write your name you could also put that on the eggs. Unfortunately for a few years, I didn’t know how to write my name so Mamma would do this for me. You then had to put the eggs in the cup of hot water for a minute or two. You then had to take the eggs out and let them dry but it only took a few minutes.
Mamma would help me find a basket to put all the eggs in so they would be easy to carry. My sisters always hid the eggs up around the house and wash shed but never in the garden. Good places were in the lilac bushes, around the propane tank, by the cellar door, next to the old cistern, by the water pump, by the fence posts going around the front yard, in the iris beds, under the front porch and many, many more places.
Then, I think it was the last year the longest Easter Egg hunt came about. It was a couple of weeks after Easter and the eggs were becoming pretty dirty and a number had cracked. They even began to smell bad. I had to beg for hours to get my sister, Marylin to hide the eggs just one more time. She did it reluctantly. I think she was determined to hide them so well I would be looking for weeks to find them all. It was getting late in the evening and when she was done, I only had about a half hour to hunt. Of course, she knew I was scared of the dark and wouldn’t be looking too long. So, I found a few and went inside the house.
The following morning, I resumed the hunt. Much to my surprise, I found only a few more eggs. But I continued to look day after day and never gave up, even looking weeks later.
Since I didn’t understand why I couldn’t find more eggs, months later, I finally came to a couple of conclusions. We had coyotes, possums, skunks, and our farm dogs. Just maybe they had found and eaten them. I always thought this was probably the answer. Then years later a bright light came to me. Maybe Marylin had fed most of them to the pigs. Now a sister who was extremely tired of hiding eggs that should have been thrown away a week earlier, wouldn’t have fed them to the hogs, you think?
The hogs will eat anything and I mean anything. Probably even little boys if given a chance.
This story was written by Robert Phillips of Lawrence, as part of his memoirs and a brief history of Virgil, where he lived as a young boy from his birth on Dec. 18, 1944 until February 1952. If you would like to contact him, his phone number is 785-393-2092 an email address is robert [email protected]
