A Strange Easter Story: Three Kinds of Lambs
I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but it provided an interesting (if somewhat unsettling) escape from my daily routine. It’s about Easter, lambs, rabbits and growing up on a ranch in Wyoming.
First, there was the Lamb of God. Second, there was the pet lamb I received every Easter. Third, there was the lamb we ate for Easter dinner.
It must have been an early Easter that year, when the ground was still frozen solid and flowers wouldn’t bloom for a month. In the photograph, I’m wearing fleecy turquoise pajamas and sipping hot chocolate with my sisters. We’re huddled together under a Pendleton, and if it weren’t for the brightly colored eggs perched in cardboard cartons on the kitchen table, I might mistake the scene for Christmas. I could never admit this to my father, a devout Catholic for whom Easter is necessarily a bigger production than any other holiday, Christmas included. Considering that my father likes to cut down not one, not two, but three trees, which he then wires together and suspends from a specially engineered bolt in the ceiling to give the illusion of a single, magnificent Tannenbaum, making Easter even more spectacular presented a challenge. Which is how our celebration came to involve livestock in the living room.
On Saturday afternoon before Easter Vigil mass, after all the other Easter eggs had been dyed, my father would line the four of us up by age—Meghan, Erin, Kelley, and Frannie—and present to us each a white egg. “I came across these eggs nestled in that old spruce out back, but no mama bird to be found,” my father would say. “It seems we should color them, shouldn’t we?” I’d say that we should. Meghan, the oldest, had the privilege of dying her egg first, but being the sister that she was, would graciously pass the honor off to me. Being the sister that I was, I would accept before Kelley or Frannie protested. “Miss Ernie,” my father would say, passing me a fragile egg. “I do believe this egg has your name on it.” With delicate hands, I would lower the egg into a ramekin of dye and remove it with utmost care. My father would gasp and point to the transformed egg. “Ernie! Show us!” Between stained fingers, I’d hold the dripping egg at an arms length to show my sisters what had been revealed by the dye: a crayoned drawing of a white lamb above the initials ‘EMM.’ I would cradle my egg during my sisters’ turns, knowing that, overnight, the Easter bunny would make each egg hatch into a newborn lamb. […]