April 13, 2006

• Easter Finery

  I
  have no plans to go anywhere on Easter this year, and if I do go
  anywhere I won’t dress up.  When I was a little girl, Easter
  always meant getting new clothes and dressing up.  It wouldn’t
  have been so bad if it hadn’t been for the Easter bonnets. 

  I don’t wear hats.  When I wear a bandana over my hair, I tie it
  at the back of my neck.  High collars, and bonnets tied under my
  chin, are uncomfortable.  That’s an understatement.  When I
  was a kid, I hated them.  When I got old enough to choose for
  myself, I stopped wearing them.

  As
  I looked through old photographs today, sorting out these Easter pics
  and a few other kid photos that could be cropped down to head shots for
  profile pics, I recognized the one at right as an Easter photo by the
  basket at my feet, but for a while I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t
  all done up in the usual inhumane monkey suit.

  I think I figured it out.  When I was about this age, three years
  old, my mother went into the hospital for a hysterectomy.  I’ll
  assume it was Daddy who saw to the traditional basket of holiday eggs
  and took my picture.  The hairdo also looks like something he
  would have arranged.  Relatively speaking, I look happy and
  comfortable there…

  …as
  opposed to this one, a year later.  My mother’s friend Audrey
  Walker crocheted the dress and hat.  The dress wasn’t starched and
  I liked it.  I remember wanting to wear my crocheted dress after
  Easter and not being allowed to because it was so fragile, always
  getting snagged on some protuberant part of the environment. 

  I was never easy on clothes.  Now that my clothes all come from
  dumpsters or from the bag sale bargain days at thrift shops, I feel a
  sense of relief when I see little flaws or stains on my “new” clothes,
  because I don’t have to worry about ruining a garment that’s already
  spoiled.

  The dress was okay.  That does not apply to the bonnets that went
  with the crocheted dresses.  Not only did they have those ribbons
  under my chin choking me, the hats themselves were stiffened with sugar
  syrup.  Regular laundry starch wasn’t stiff enough for the
  purpose, so the hats had an abrasive feel and a slight glittery effect
  from sugar crystals.  I was forbidden to lick or suck on my hats.

  I
  remember my glee one Easter when I came running to see why my mother
  had screamed, and found that ants had gotten into the hatbox on a high
  shelf where my bonnet had been stored since the previous Easter. 
  They had eaten enough of that hat that I never had to wear it again.

  Audrey made me a new one, pineapple pattern to match the new
  dress.  This dress was not as okay as the previous one. 
  Those dangling pineapple furbelows tickled me with every step I
  took.  Likewise, the fancy little points on the sleeves kept me
  fidgeting and suppressing yips and whimpers in church.

  Maybe
  all that fidgeting helped persuade Mama and Audrey that another
  crocheted Easter dress wasn’t appropriate.  Anyhow, the next
  Easter I had this ruffled organdy dress and a straw bonnet.  From
  the look on my face, I’d guess that I was ordered to smile.

  I don’t remember anything specific about this Easter that I was six,
  nor do I recall exactly when the ants got my bonnet.  I have some
  memories of chocolate bunnies and molded sugar “picture eggs” with
  little paper scenes set up inside them and a peephole in one end.

  I recall, too, the preparations for more than one Easter, though I
  can’t tie any of them to a particular year.  Mama would get out
  several old teacups with cracks or broken handles and mix dye tablets
  with hot water and vinegar.  I’d write names or draw designs on
  eggs with a clear wax crayon, set the eggs into a twisted wire holder,
  and dip them in the dye cups.  Doug and I reenacted that ritual a
  few times when he was small.

  The
  Easter I remember best was the one when I was seven, the first one
  after my father’s death.  That this is the one I recall most
  clearly tends to validate what I have been learning about traumatic
  learning, the way memories are imprinted most strongly in times of
  trauma.  That Easter there were no new clothes.  Mama and I
  spent it in Sacramento with my Uncle Scotty, Aunt Ella, and cousins Don
  and Nancy.  We had an Easter egg hunt that turned into a hilarious
  tumult of giggles and screams when I realized that Donny was going
  around behind me, hiding eggs in places where I had already looked.

  Not every year after that, but a few times, there would be a new dress
  for Easter.  If there was ever another Easter bonnet, it wasn’t
  photographed, and I don’t recall any.  By the time I was eleven, I
  was allowed more of a voice in the choice of my clothing and I had
  things I could wear on more than just a single occasion.  I would
  still be wearing the dress in the last pic on the right after I was married,
  until it became stained with blood when my husband punched me in the
  nose.  But that’s another story, isn’t it?

  

  • 9:07 pm
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