Pagan's Easters, Mostly.

I don't remember much of hunting for Easter Eggs in my youth.  I remember watching my sister Frances and my mother boiling the eggs and dyeing the eggs and just a brief thrill of finding one or two hidden in the yard and that is about it.

I remember visiting a new friend in the 8th grade, Paul Rymniak in Pine Forest Apartments.  His family showed me some Easter Eggs that had just made.  They were intricate detailed art on each egg.  Their grandmother was Russian and she taught them the art.  Paul went on to be a deacon in the Catholic Church.

Also in the 8th grade on Easter Sunday Frances went to Acworth Beach to sun bathe.  Milton Martin and I went along.  Around the bend in a cove was someone renting rowboats.  I  know there were rented cheaply or otherwise we could not afford it.  We spent the day rowing around on the edge of the lake opposite side from the beach.  Where we mostly rowed was like a swamp with trees in the water and little creeks going into the water and canal like water ways.  I think that was just the first or second year Acworth Beach and the lake in general was opened for recreation. 

We wore bathing suits.  We did not realize it at the time but  we were becoming sunburned.  At the end of the day we were as red as lobsters.  I had several painful nights of trying to sleep after that.   After the red came and my skin was dead and was peeled off I kept an in-baked tan that stayed with me up until my mid 60s. 

Not long after that Milton Martin joined the Air Force.   In the past dozen or so years there is/was a Milton Martin who owned a car dealership in Gainesville, Georgia.  I have often wondered if that was the Milton I knew.

At least once, maybe more, on Easter we went  swimming jumping from the houseboat at Victoria Landing.  It was a last minute decision so we didn't have our bathing suits.  We wore our Fruit of the Loom white jockey underwear.  I remember the water was very cold and hard to get used to.

I think it was on an Easter Sunday morning after swimming and guzzling beer we decided to visit the Crawford's cabin around a couple of bends from  Victoria Landing.   All were on the roof of houseboat sunbathing and I was left to steer or navigate.  Down at lake level handling an outboard motor I got dizzy and had to let my steering go and hand my head over the side to throw up; heave.

At that moment the Crawfords were having a party on top of their boathouse.  They looked up and saw the houseboat going around in circles but edging closer to them.   I think I remember it scared them.  I forgot the outcome, but no one got hurt.

The next day at work I  told a girl I have known a long time, before high school, about the almost houseboat/boathouse wreck and us swimming on Easter Day.  She said, "Didn't y'all freeze your balls off?"

Suddenly people in the room got quiet.  You could hear a pin drop.

After she walked away, a deacon that lived near Dallas said, "Does she always talk like that??"

Not many years later, in 1964 several of my Navy friends  went to upstate New York to visit my uncle on Easter.  He was the director of Clear Pool Boys Camp.  There was a rushing whitewater stream going through the property.  The water was tempting.  We stripped down to our Navy boxer skivvies and hit the water.  Upstate New York?  Easter?  

Again, we froze our balls off.

The next year some of us decided to go to the Easter Parade on the Boardwalk of Atlantic City, about 40 miles away..  The was a sight to see.  People overdressed in their best clothes and strolled.  I wished I had a video camera then.  The pretentious highly dressed walks were amazing.

When Rocky and Adam were young their aunt Mary Prance Miller would have an Easter Egg Hunt.  During that time we went to two sunrise services.  One at Kennesaw Mountain and the other one at Campground Methodist.  I liked the one at the Campground Methodist most.  Afterwards they had a breakfast with pancakes and sausages.