Circle M Farm

I’m sure there’s a whole great big pagan history of why Easter ended up being celebrated the way it did; why eggs and bunnies have come to represent the Western version of the holiday. It all somehow makes intuitive sense to me, and maybe that’s simply a factor of being born in the West and steeped in the culture. Culture is funny but it somehow works. Now that I’ve got this farm and I’m living more in tune with the seasons than I was able to in Chicago, I find many of those cultural givens make actual sense.

Eggs and Easter and Spring, for instance. The goose has just started to lay her gigantic eggs. When I saw her sitting on her nest this morning, for the first time this year, my heart just leaped and I felt that spring had truly arrived. Toulouse, our generally very kind and gentle grey goose, becomes a quite aggressive broody mother. She looks so serene and graceful sitting atop her lightly buried eggs, but the moment you get anywhere near her, she’s positively terrifying. I happened to catch her off the nest in the afternoon, in the pasture nipping up new green grass. So I made a beeline for the nest to get the eggs while I could. (We have no gander, so there’s no sense in letting her sit, as none of the eggs will hatch.) But she saw me and came half-running, half-flying, loudly honking toward me. I won the race to the nest, though, and uncovered three eggs. Each one is an omelet.

The chickens, too, are laying in earnest. All through the fall and winter I wrestle with whether it’s worth feeding them – especially expensive organic feed! Doubt. But finally, the hen house is giving me six to ten eggs a day, and the little chicken tractor full of new layers gave me two this evening. I do worry that most of the eggs are going to end up in the hedgrows, as the chickens range farther and farther afield. Literally. But they are quite beautiful poking through the neighbor’s corn stubble. There is so much life walking about in every direction.

I’m glad that Easter falls during our hemisphere’s spring. It makes sense to me to celebrate the Resurrection when life is returning to fields and farmyards and roadsides and parks. It makes sense to celebrate Eternal Life when you are finding little tufts of bunny nest in your backyard. Luminous bluebirds suddenly flash, barely visible, from one tree to another. Anything seems possible.

Today I took two of my lambs to an Easter Egg Hunt sponsored by my little town and our neighboring village, smaller still. We were to be the petting zoo before the big event. I held darling Frankie and Johnny in my arms, offered them for petting and posed for pictures. When it was time for the search, it poured, but the kids flooded out into the baseball field anyway, and scrambled to gather up pastel plastic eggs. The whole event was over in about 30 seconds. And then the fire truck pulled up, honked it’s great deep horn, and delivered the Easter Bunny! He was wet and soggy, but hung jauntily off the side of the truck and waved. Again, my heart leaped! The relevance and resonance of these symbols, simple as they are, are undeniably powerful. They work in the sense that they open our hearts to the unfathomable mysteries to which they’re attached.

I am thankful everyday that I get to live in the symbols. Pocketfuls of eggs, pastures full of lambs, gardens up in sprouts. Easter. Life.