For most families that celebrate Easter Sunday, children can count on the same wild and wondrous traditions that we as a society have been enacting for generations. Pastel painted eggs scattered around living rooms and backyards to be collected in brightly woven baskets. Brunches, lunches, and the shedding of winter coats in favor of soft pink dresses or yellow button up shirts. Even those that observe the holiday for its religious connotations will usually enjoy some sort of hybrid of the secular and holy practices, as was the case for our family.
I like to think that our Easters were something spectacular– on par with the same pageantry as Christmas or Halloween. From the start of the Lenten season in February until Easter Sunday, we would partake in a host of celebrations ranging from a Fat Tuesday feast to a freezing cold sunrise service held lakeside on Easter morning. It sounds torturous, but after taking part in a 48 hour fast prior to the holiday, we were more than willing to wake up early knowing that breakfast and hot coffee were close at hand.
Around noon, the church would fling open its doors to a blessed spring day, and my family would prepare ourselves for our annual workout. I say annual because at no other point in the year did we extend ourselves so enthusiastically, and if we attempted it more than once, we wouldn’t have survived.
Besides the mountain of decadent chocolate and marshmallows we would find in our baskets each year, our parents usually gifted us some sort of outfit or small toy. Bubbles, streamers, and stuffed animals were frequently featured, but this particular tradition began the year that my parents supplied my brothers and I with kites.
Following a church service and subsequent egg hunt, we would pack up the treasures bestowed upon us by the Easter Bunny and drive thirty minutes to show them off to our cousins and grandparents. The weather was gorgeous the first year we got the kites, and after indulging in another enormous meal and an inadvisable serving of pie, we waddled our way across the street to the empty soccer fields. The sky was blue from one horizon to the other, and warm Colorado sun beat down on our chocolate-smeared faces. It was perfect for a picnic, a hike, or lounging beneath a shady tree. Flying kites, though, was trickier to manage. For that first Easter, and every single one that followed, there wasn’t a lick of wind.
Instead, guts heavy with creamed corn and ham, we would pair up and one person would stand at the top of the five-foot hill that sloped onto the field, while the other took off at a full sprint toward the tennis courts. Once the cord was yanked taught by the sprinter, the partner holding the kite would launch it as high as they could into that fathomless blue sky.
“I think it’s working!” The sprinter would call over their shoulder. The launcher would wave and call out their encouragement, but anyone looking on could see that their hope was in vain. Whatever short-lived buoyancy the kite would gain after takeoff always inevitably came crashing back to Earth in a tangle of string and canvas wings. The kite would nosedive, then be dragged along in a floppy imitation of a pigeon with a broken wing, its abusive handlers howling in delight.
For hours we would race around that field trying to find the sweet spot that would lift the kites from our hands and send them into full sail.
“What if we both run?” someone would suggest after returning to the starting point, panting between each word. “Or what if you jump while you throw it to get more air?”
Before long, we were all running madly, some of us leaping into the air while others flapped their arms in a parody of what we hoped the kites might pick up on. At one point my brother eyed a low building near the parking lot as if to take a run at it and launch his kite from the roof. But that’s just not how the atmosphere works.
It was both physical exercise and an exercise in patience as we rewound the strings over and over until we each had burns laced across our fingers from the friction.
Legs and lungs on fire, my cousins and I would begin bargaining with God, crossing our fingers rather than folding our hands because even then, we knew our actions to be somewhat sacrilegious. On the holiest of days, haggling with The Almighty whilst presenting our kites as a slightly bent offering, never did seem to play in our favor.
Even so, grass-stained and sweaty, we never walked away defeated. It was as exhilarating an occasion as any other– one that we looked forward to each year. We were in our favorite place with our favorite people. To those families that treated the afternoon with a sense of decorum, they would have peeked through their curtains to observe a psychotic family tearing around an empty field, and that knowledge made it all the more special. In the face of futility, we laughed; a living art piece depicting what it truly means to have faith despite insurmountable odds.
Now that I have a son of my own, I find myself clinging desperately to these memories, wanting more than anything to share some of that magic with him. I’ll strap him into his stroller, and we’ll meander through our own parks and neighborhoods while I search for that ideal setting. None have come close to those empty soccer fields, or perhaps it’s just that my mind can’t conjure up the vision of us anywhere else, but I still try. I’ll stop with him next to park benches and swing sets and force my inner eye to see him there, years in the future, in grass-stained khakis and a sweaty face.
I imagine what it will be like to pick out his kite and prop it up against his Easter basket stuffed full of marshmallows and chocolate in the living room. We’ll poke him awake at the crack of dawn to give thanks for this outrageous freedom we call everlasting joy. Then, after hunting for eggs and stuffing him full of ham and creamed corn, I’ll send him forth to gallop at full speed, legs churning, beneath that fathomless blue sky.