Easter Miracles

Before I tell my stories, I want to explain that in Germany we have an "Easter Bunny" that goes around and hides coloured eggs and sweets for the kids to find them. Well, in my days we looked for eggs and chocolate, these days the kids get iPhones ...but I did not want to complain. I wanted to tell you two Easter Sunday stories.

Number one goes back to when I was a child. We did not live in a house with a garden, so the Easter treasures were hidden somewhere in the flat - which made my mother find some very old chocolate egg in the settee half a year later, but that is another story.

Anyway, one Easter custom was the walk with my parents. My sister and I were delighted:  in the grass to the right and left of the path there were coloured sugar eggs. And chocolate eggs. We collected them, brought them back to our parents and ran off to find more ...

And even years later, when I knew that my father had dropped the treasures while we were walking along  - also dropped those, that we already had found, a second or third time - it did not change the Easter Miracle.

Searching and finding was more important than owning. And I think the most important treasure was the experience that you can find all sorts of good things  next to your way - and they are even more precious when someone who loves you dropped them there.

The second story takes places decades later - my son was about four or five and he was a very rational little fellow. Santa Claus ... no, never, that was Daddy . And, of course, he was highly sceptical about the Easter Bunny, too.

That year we had come back from a short holiday by car. We had driven through the night and when we arrived early Easter Sunday morning, my son was peacefully snoring on the back seat. So my husband jumped out of the car and quickly hid all the sweets in the garden.

Then we woke up our son who was firmly convinced that he had not slept and had had total control over his parents' actions.

He spotted the big chocolate Easter Bunny sitting under a tree immediately ... and who describes the wonder when he found more eggs and chocolate things under flowers and strawberry plants .
"Now I do get some doubts..." - he said.

Even years later, when he realized how it  had worked, he insisted on having been awake all night  thus having been the witness of a true Easter Miracle.

Maybe we humans need "miracles" from time to time. The belief in someone holding and guarding us. Someone  loving us.

I wish you all a hopeful Easter - remember, we celebrate the victory of life over death on this day.

Futility

When I got up this morning and staggered into the kitchen, I stumbled across the wires and cables from our Internet/telephone system. I had organized them well, had put some order into the chaos, had hung up the router and the other boxes so that nobody can step on them, had fixed wires and cables --- and yesterday my son (18) found out, we had forgotten to connect his PlayStation 3 and ripped it all apart. What he needs is a longer wire for the PS, but until he gets it, he improvises. Of course, in search of one, he dropped thirty other things and didn't pick them up, either.

*sigh*

This reminds me of the time when he was little. You may know how toddlers are, that within seconds they can turn a room into the chaos that was before God created the world. Or how kids stampede through your freshly cleaned house with muddy shoes only minutes after you have put away bucket and broom. In contrast to my ex, my son usually keeps his chaos to his own room and when it oozes into mine, it takes me only half an hour to make him tidy it up. Still - I am getting too old for that. I want some order. I need some order. Feng Shui says negative energies get caught up in the chaos and I have put up with negative energies for so long, I want some order. And I am getting tired of trying to re-establish some order that has been destroyed.

One could now think about how life is one great big struggle and how a lot of things are like that: you do something, you fail, you pick yourself up and brush yourself down and start all over again (to quote a song from a Fred Astaire movie). But surely, there can be one area in your life where you can relax and gather fresh energies? Only ONE !?!?!

This sense of futility, by the way, is also one I sometimes have in my job. No matter what I do, for the next 15 years I will have to explain the difference between "is" and "are". Those who have mastered this problem and a lot more, will leave and let university professors and employers profit from my efforts. They will pick the fruits from the tree that I (and my colleagues) planted and nursed and protected and told off for being late. My students don't get older than 19, but I see how I age when I look into the mirror. It is a weird world I live in and one that can make you crazy, if you think about it.

They say, kids keep you young. Sometimes they can make you feel very very old and tired,too.