Happy Easter

When I was seven years old I had the most nightmarish Easter of my life.

We lived in the country, about a mile outside town in an already rural area. Traditionally, we would spend the morning hunting down eggs hidden by the "Easter Bunny" the night before. Unfortunately, when my Mom let our dog Peanut out for his morning constitutional he'd decided to go walkabout. That meant we had to wrangle him up before he had a fatal encounter with the highway traffic about a hundred yards from our house.

This turned out to be both good and bad news to my sisters and I for our Easter egg hunt. Bad because our immediate gratification was delayed by hunting down the dog. Good thanks to us being able to sneakily spot all the eggs that had already been hidden in the front yard. Thankfully, after about ten minutes Peanut finally came bounding back from the woods and we could get him on his leash.

We tore through the front yard in about five minutes. I'm sure my parents were secretly amused at our slyness in "discovering" the eggs we'd already marked for recovery during the dog hunt, but much fun was had by all.

Then we walked around the house to tackle the back yard.

Imagine four youngsters, aged 7, 5, 4, and 3, having the time of their young lives searching for eggs hidden by the Easter Bunny. As they come around the corner they see a few less than well hidden eggs and a bunch of...fuzzy stuff...scattered across the yard. Like grey-ish white cotton batting.

Now imagine their faces as they realized what that fuzzy stuff, and the other, rather more bloody pieces scattered across the yard, actually was.

A bunny. The bunny that had been the cause of our dog's early morning disappearance.

The. Easter. Bunny.

That was the last time we had an Easter egg hunt.