Easter in Oz

Feels like Easter

It's Easter Sunday today, and while it may not have the self-reflective quality that say, Christmas, or the first day of school does, it's still a day to look back. When I was a kid, we often went to Massachusetts on Easter weekend, to see my grandparents who lived in North Reading, just north of Boston, in a small Cape Cod house at No. 29 Eames Street. My sisters and I loved the house because of how it smelled, but more so because we loved seeing our grandparents. They were funny and affectionate.

On Easter Sunday in North Reading, we'd get gift baskets from Grammie, filled with plastic, opalescent grass, a chocolate bunny, and candy you could only buy in the States. We'd then hunt throughout the living room for jelly beans that she and my mother would have hidden in the room, before eating ham for dinner, in the small kitchen with the red and black linoleum floor. After dinner, we'd watch The Wizard of Oz on TV, which was shown every year at Easter on CBS. The moment when black and white Dorothy opens her front door to a full-colour Oz blew my mind every time I saw it. It still does. And those flowers, the blue sky and the very beginning of the yellow brick road still feel like Easter to me, no matter how old I get.