I’m getting ready to celebrate my 72nd Easter Sunday, although I have to resort to my diary to recall our whereabouts over the last twenty-five years. Before that time, it’s all a blur, including the annual competitive battle with my sister as kids to collect the most hidden eggs. I know for a fact that I’ve attended the church of the pavement the last fourteen years, getting a run in before the feast. It’s the only place of worship where the rafters wouldn’t fall in at the shock of my being there. I’m just not a believer!

Many an Easter my wife and I have spent on the move, but this year we’re hosting my son’s family in our Florida home. As for just the two of us, our first Easter together was nothing more than a rendezvous, while on April 23, 2000, tornados filled the news, yet it was three more months before I would be responsible for the TV news operation in Lafayette. A year later, we spent the Easter holiday telling both sets of parents about our upcoming Las Vegas wedding plans.

In the first few years of marriage, we then visited Elkhart or Rochester, our hometowns, to be with family. In 2003, we visited my son in a Tampa, Florida hospital, never suspecting that we would ultimately end up in this area 18-years later. We went to Bern’s Steakhouse on Easter Sunday to celebrate our second wedding anniversary, relieved that he was doing better after the car accident. Business meetings took us to New York City in 2004 and 2005 before returning to family in Rochester and Elkhart the next year. In 2007, we joined my wife’s sister in Indianapolis for an annual Easter affair, until we moved to Austin, Texas in 2009 and dined by ourselves in the company provided apartment on deviled eggs. Tinker, our schnauzer who had ears like a bunny, had just completed her first Mighty Texas Dog Walk the day before.

We came back to Indy the next year to see my wife’s eldest daughter. In 2011, she then came to us for an Easter brunch and to see the peacocks at Green Pastures. The next year I went back to Florida for Easter with the grandkids after attending the Marlins vs. Cardinals game in Miami. We didn’t stay home the next year, either, choosing to spend our Easter in Napa sampling wines. Our last Easter in Austin was in 2014, doing little more than binge watching Breaking Bad episodes.

Portland was our next career stop, with a 2015 Easter brunch at Urban Farmer in the Nines Hotel, followed by a red eye to Florida for an egg hunt with the kids in 2016. The next Easter Sunday, we were in Maui on a boat looking for whales. In 2018, Easter was also April Fool’s Day in the Rose City, so we went to Cracker Barrell, while the next year’s Easter holiday was spent enjoying a quiet Easter morning at the Atticus Hotel in McMinnville. We had sold our Portland home and moved to a downtown apartment, before the Covid outbreak of 2020 limited us to neighborhood activities, but Easter was a “five peak” day.

As we then made our move to Florida in April of 2021, a most memorable Easter Sunday was spent at Kit Carson Memorial Hospital in Burlington, Colorado. It was sadly our second Easter visit to a hospital together, this time the result of my wife’s kidney stone. On a more positive note, last year, the grandkids enjoyed the Easter-eve egg hunt in our new Islandwalk community with a seven-foot-tall Easter Bunny, including the ears. Today, the kids each collected a bucketful of candy, cash, and stuffed bunnies after our family sit-down meal. Looking ahead a year from now on Easter Sunday, my wife and I will have just left Dakar, Senegal on a cruise ship headed for Casablanca. “Here’s Looking at you, kid.” Happy Easter to all!