Keeping All of My Eggs In One Basket

 

Julie Catherine

Easter Sunday, 1976

     I was just shy of my 5th birthday and in the beginning stages of my Little House on the Prairie  obessession when this photo was taken on Easter Sunday in 1976.  If you look closely at this picture you can see my Grandma in the background bending down, probably helping one of my cousins find an egg. If you look very closely at this picture you can see the bonnet that matches the dress I'm wearing covering the eggs in my basket. There was also a matching purse. My mother went wild with the sewing machine that spring.  Anyhoo, back to the point of this story.  We were having a family egg hunt which was all fine and dandy until I realized that in order to participate in this egg hunt I was going to have to give up my eggs - eggs that I had worked very hard to color - just so that they could be hidden and hunted for.  I feel that it's necessary to interrupt this story for a minute to point out that we were hunting for actual eggs, not fun candy-filled eggs, but real hard-boiled eggs that we colored the night before which seems, I don't know,  a little icky.  Anyway, giving up my eggs so somebody could hide them and then take the chance that somebody else would find them just didn't make much sense to me. Of course the story that's been told in the intervening years centers on the fact that I wouldn't hide my eggs - like it's some sort of character flaw.  What I want to point out is that while I did not hide I also did not hunt.  I started the day with 12 eggs and I ended the day with 12 eggs. Even steven. 

     In the photo on the right you can see that my cousin Wendy looks a little bit unhappy.  Maybe it's because she gave up her twelve eggs and then only found ten.  Maybe it's because one of her favorite eggs was cracked during the frenzy of the hunt.  Now look at me sitting there smiling down at the top of Wendy's pouting head holding my can of Grape Fanta and my basket FULL of eggs.  I was a happy camper. Why?  Because I kept all of my eggs in one my basket.

     I don't know if there have been any scientific studies conducted on this particular genetic link but my own experience has led me to conclude that "not hunting for Easter eggs" can be an inherited genetic trait.  This photo of Owen and me was taken in 2004 at an Easter Egg Hunt here in Nashville where Owen politely but ever so firmly refused to hunt for eggs. We are who we are.