Dying eggs and other memories of Easters pass

After you've lived so long, you find fewer and fewer surprises in life. But they're still there.

For example, I was at the Store That Sells Everything the other day, and as I turned the corner past the large cooling case stocked with cartons of eggs, something caught my eye. I stopped, backed up with my shopping cart (not always easy to do in this store) and felt my jaw drop.

Honest to goodness, there were cartons of eggs that had already been boiled and dyed, ready to go in Easter baskets filled with plastic grass.

Many of you will recall a time when getting ready for Easter wasn't so easy. You couldn't just walk into Ward's Supermarket in my favorite hometown in the Ozarks over yonder and expect to find ready-to-eat Easter eggs. It just didn't happen.

No, if you lived on a farm you probably had laying hens -- at least the ones the foxes hadn't nabbed yet. These chickens laid eggs, and we ate the eggs every morning for breakfast.

As Easter approached we would start saving the eggs with the snowy white shells. We only ate the eggs with brown shells. Dying brown eggs does not produce good results. Trust me on this.

Once you were ready to dye and decorate the eggs, you bought RIT dye from the special display at the grocery store. Once you had eggs and dye, you were ready to set up the egg-coloring assembly line on the oak kitchen table covered with the oilskin tablecloth.

The first step in any serious egg-dying operation was obeying your mother's command to put on old clothes. "Go find those jeans with the ripped out bottom," she would say. "No one's going to see you."

RIT dye has a way of spreading far beyond the teacups we used to hold the various colors of dye. A splash here, a spill there and pretty soon your shirt would look like it had been attacked by a tie-dye maniac. That would be a shirt that, no matter how many times it was bleached, you would never wear to town again.

Each package of RIT dye came with a wax pencil. I never got the hang of using it. Some artistic cousins knew that any surface of an egg covered with wax wouldn't be affected by the dye. This meant that certain folks skilled in egg dying could create patterns using several colors on one egg.

Not me. My eggs were red, blue, yellow. Period. Occasionally I experimented with double dipping, using the red and yellow dyes to make a passable orange egg.

When all the eggs were dyed and dried, they went into a shoe box lined with fake grass so old no one could remember when it first became part of our lives. Some of the eggs would go to school for an Easter egg hunt. Yes, this was a public school, and no one gave it a second thought that we were participating in a pagan-turned-Christian observance during recess. We were less afraid of the ACLU than we were of God Almighty who could, if he wanted, send you straight to hell for refusing to participate in the egg hunt. I know He could, because I listened very carefully to the evangelist preaching that fiery sermon on a hot summer night underneath the brush arbor erected -- were else? -- on the playground of Shady Nook School. But that's another story.

On Easter Sunday, of course, some of the colored eggs went to church, and after the service and after singing "Up From the Grave He Arose" with all our might, we went outside to look for eggs someone had hidden during the sermon filled with images of rolling gravestones and coming back to life after being killed on a cross. That's a lot for a farm boy to take in, let me tell you.

Many years later, when I had sons of my own, another father and I were enlisted as "room mommies" -- don't ask -- to help the real room mommies with the Easter party for our third graders. So Ray and I went out on the playground at Eugene Field Elementary School and hid -- really hid -- over a hundred plastic eggs filled with candy.

Little did Ray and I understand about Easter parties for third graders. The whole idea, it was explained later, was to let the kids quickly find enough candy to rot out all their teeth and run back to the classroom where they could eat the licorice ears off the Twinkie rabbits with jelly-bean eyes. We had no idea that third graders wouldn't hunt for well-hidden eggs even if they were filled with sugary treats.

I suspect that if you go to that playground today you could still find a plastic egg or two, even though more than 30 years have passed since that fateful and not entirely tearless Easter party. Hint: Be sure to check all the downspouts.

Or you could go to the Store That Sells Everything and get ready-made dyed eggs. Which means you would miss the mess, the wax pencil, making green dye by mixing the yellow and blue, trying to wash all those colors off your hands and arms and face and many, many other places, hiding the eggs, hunting for them, eating them and, finally, waiting for the aroma of the first rotten egg, lost in the corner of the living room behind the sofa, to explode.

You choose.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.