When my girls were young, my mom bought bread from a local bakery once a year for Easter dinner. Several of the grandkids enjoyed peanut butter sandwiches on the multi-colored bread. The bakery made loaves with several spring colors. Then the bakery closed, and we haven’t had Easter bread, as we called it, for a dozen or more year.
Until this year.
My girls talked about it a month or so before Easter, and my youngest decided to try to make it. She sent her sister and me photos through the process.
It worked! And it was delicious. Her next attempt, for Easter dinner, included a fourth color yellow. It was delicious, too.
It’s fun to relive some of the good memories from childhood years. That’s been challenging the last couple years, because many experiences have been tainted in the context of no longer having the family they grew up in and felt stable in together as we move into the future. I have tried to let them set the pace of their healing and reflecting while dealing with my own process at the same time.
I am learning that we can loop back and appreciate some moments and memories, bringing them into the present and future without avoiding the pain and reality of where we’ve been and where we are.
