Thoughts on Easters past

To the editor:
    Coincidence or divine providence for Easter? On Friday, the three cards meant to go out last Monday were still missing. That evening they showed up in a spot I had searched before. Then a friend called: He had found my certified mail receipts, missing for two weeks. They were beside his computer where he hoped to check the two tracking numbers for arrival. Checking now showed arrivals 13 days before, so did that make 13 on this Friday a lucky number?
    The Easter Bunny must have been working early to find the missing items. Some would say God or the good Lord helped me. I once heard a woman tell a friend, “I was driving on a country road with the fuel gauge near empty when God put a gas station up ahead. He looks out for me.”
    Other Easter Sundays came to mind. I was about 5 when my father made a rare visit to the Unitarian Church in Houlton to see me, all dressed up, recite a poem. When he told a woman he was an atheist, she said, “You believe in trees and flowers, don’t you? … Of course you do. Well, then, you must believe in God.”
    On Easter morning a few years later, a huge bunny arrived from French’s Drugstore, with my father’s help. When we saw it in the window earlier in the week, I said, “Maybe I’ll buy it,” but he suggested, “Perhaps you should wait and see…”
    It was in the 1960s that a friend arrived late for our group’s Easter brunch with this story: “I had to stop for a rabbit in the road … Yeah, he was carrying two very big eggs, one in each front paw. I was worried. What if he dropped one? But he made it across the road.”
    About 10 years later on the day before Easter, friends were away and I felt I should be traveling. Too late, so I went shopping instead — just to look around — and bought a near-life-sized stuffed Pekingese similar to Tootsie, who was very much alive when she stayed with me on SchoStee in Houlton. She walked outside without a leash, but had to be lifted over the snow that was too high for her short legs.
    Skip another 10 years to the ‘80s when I thought a very longhaired, fluffy bunny about a foot long would please a neighbor’s child, but it could not sit upright without propping. He — it — got out of the to-donate bag onto the cedar chest, then finally to the back seat of my car, where he lies flat, tired of trying to sit.
    Only while writing this did I realize that the big bunny, the Pekingese (stuffed and live), and the fluffy bunny were all the same color, a dark honey, with some white on the front. Coincidence? Or a resurrection of sorts? We resurrect the past in our actions, in our thoughts, in our memories….
Byrna Porter Weir
Rochester, N.Y