Nature’s first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Grandma
Strangely, a memory that comes back to me every now and then and just makes me feel…sad, yet nostalgic, is a ridiculous one.
It was Easter, and I don’t remember how old I was, but I was definitely still of the age where having Easter egg hunts was exciting. Though I am pretty certain that I had never honestly believed in magical holiday characters like the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus or Cupid, I was an avid reader with a wild imagination, and I really enjoyed pretending at anything. Spying and sneaking was a hobby, my stuffed animals secretly came to life when I wasn’t looking, and if princes and princesses actually existed in the world, then wizards and witches were real, too, as far as I were concerned. So, it wasn’t beyond my realm of understanding that there was always the possibility that Santa and the Easter Bunny could be based in truth somehow, somewhere. Maybe they were just extra good at being discreet because I was Chinese, and they were American?
My cousins, my little brother, and I were all playing outside our grandparents’ house, as we were apt to do when there was no school - digging for Rollie Pollies, dragging around the red wagon full of leaves and grass and rose petals stolen off our grandmother’s prized garden, and basically tearing things apart for our games and experiments. Thinking back, no wonder we played outside; we would have been caged animals among delicate figurines and precious photographs. Disasters waiting to happen.
Here, the details elude me, but some chain of events led us a few houses down the street, still lugging that now-rusted red wagon. There, by a mailbox, a shiny Easter Egg filled with a tiny toy was discovered and fawned over amidst gaping sounds of wonder; it was an Easter miracle! The five us figured out that where there was one, there had to be more nearby - and boy, were we right. The colored Eggs were in surprising abundance and in the most perfect of hiding places. Each one was tucked away just out of sight, but a slight brush of a small pile of leaves, a tiny hop on the tip-toes towards a low-hanging tree branch, and a little bit of elbow grease, and EXCITEMENT! JOY! TRIUMPH! Each one was filled with it’s own special treasure. Never had an Easter Egg hunt been so satisfying.
Maybe minutes had gone by, maybe longer, but we didn’t know and we didn’t care. We just wanted to find more! We kept exclaiming at each precious find, and it was the best Easter ever! Then, Hell broke loose.
Before we knew what was happening, a woman came screeching out of her front door, waving her arms at us with the angriest face we’d ever seen. Slowly, the words she was hurling at us began to process, and we heard her tell us that we were awful children who had just ruined her baby’s Easter Egg hunt. She chased us down the street, only a few houses, right onto our grandparents’ porch, where, at this time, one of my cousins had started to cry, and my brother’s bottom lip had begun to quiver. We cowered in fear and shame, not knowing what to do, only able to look at our shuffling feet and stand in awkward silence.
The glass door opened with a bang as my Grandmother charged out of the house. She stood in confusion, only seeing her little grandchildren being berated by a wild woman, who now had her husband behind her, visibly upset, but still trying to calm her down. Some vague realization dawned on my usually firecracker-like beloved Grandma, as she didn’t speak fluent English, and she looked at us pitifully. Patting our heads and telling us to apologize in Chinese, she clumsily repeated “Sorry-ah! Sorry-ah! Babies! They don’t know!” to her neighbors, as we mumbled our insufficient and childish versions, still shamed and devastated at our mistake.
I’m not sure what happened then, being preoccupied at my own humiliation at the time, but they must have felt bad for us in the end, because they later invited us over for a smaller and less exciting Easter Egg party at their house. I don’t think we went because my awesome grandmother spent the rest of the day laughing hysterically at us with her loud cackling and hollering, poking fun and teasing. Eventually, she calmed down enough to tell us that mistakes will happen in life - there’s no point in being sad or discouraged because you always learn from them. The best thing to do is to make sure you learn, and then have a good laugh.
The next day, she walked across the street to the dollar store, bought a bag of plastic eggs, stuck $5 in each, and presented us with our own special treasures, for no reason other than she loved us.
We were blessed to have known such a wonderful and crazy woman, and from this memory, the thing that I recall the most vividly is her laugh. She always had a good laugh.
