Easter 1961. Janelle (6), Norah (4), Yours Truly (2 1/2)

If you have been following this blog for more than a couple of years, you will remember the Easter - Then and Now post. It was a good post that is worth a rerun and an update. As my mother would say, “Laugh? I thought my pants would never dry.” So as I prepared for this Easter post, I went back through my photo albums to search for a few more pictures to share with you.

Back in 2019, my sisters and I took a little trip to the Outer Banks together and, somehow, I was able to talk them into posing for some photos. If it had not been a spur of the moment thing I would have come up with pastel dresses and little white socks, but when you are trying to make humor with your sisters you just have to go with what you have at the moment.

As I looked for more Easter photos, all I could find were images of me with my basket - no sisters. I pondered this, wondering why, in 1964 and 1965, my sisters did not pose with me. I tried to figure out how old I was then but found it too mind-boggling to manage, so I found a very useful site called yourdateofbirth.com. Talk about a time sink. This site lets you calculate your age in the past, present and future. It seemed familiar and I realized it was the site I used on a day a few years ago when, no lie, I couldn’t remember how old I was. I know that sounds feeble-minded but, as you get older, you have counted so many years that it all starts to become a blur because, who gives a shit? You haven’t been carded for alcohol in 40 years, and you look so old that the ticket seller at the movie theater automatically offers you the senior price. There just ceases to be a reason why you need to know how old you are anymore, so you free up that part of your memory for something more relevant, like when you last took an ibuprofen or what you scored on the last hole. My daughter was born in the beginning of 1990, so that is super simple - the second digit of her age is the same as the year, and all I have to remember is the decade. Except for in January. So just don’t ask me how old she is in January. After that, I always know how old she is and I add 3 years to her age to remember how old her brother is. (No offense, Taylor). I digress, but I haven’t been on a tangential tear for a very long time and I think you probably miss it. So anyway, I went to yourdateofbirth.com/how-old-was-i, entered my birthdate and asked how old I was in April of 1964 and 1965 and discovered I was 5 1/2 and 6 1/2 respectively. Would my sisters really have refused to pose with me when they were 8 and 10? Probably. They would never play with me either, unless Momma begged them to because I was driving her nuts. Such is the sad, lonely life of the youngest sister.

My cogitations did lead to a better understanding of why middle sisters are so psycho. They act cool to hang out with the oldest sister, then turn around and are forced to play with the youngest one. It practically requires a split personality and I have a new found appreciation for why my sister Norah, the middle one, has always been a little… different. Bless her heart. The good news is that she is no longer a teenager and is coming to my house for an Easter meal today at which I will serve a grilled, boned, butterflied leg of lamb that has been marinating since Tuesday. It is so good that I put it in the recipes section of this blog back in 2018. And before you go writing a blog post about marinating something, you should know that marinade is the mixture. Marinate is what you do to it. This was pointed out to me by loyal reader, Mary Caperton (a two word first name, like my own) because I had erroneously called the solution marinate in my post. Six years later, this still causes me a great deal of consternation, as I do not like to make grammatical errors in my posts. Once you mix up marinade and marinate or use lie and lay incorrectly, can readers ever trust you again?

Me (left) with my sister Norah, posing with our Easter eggs. As soon as this picture was taken, she ran off to sneak cigarettes with Janelle.

It was sad enough that I posed for pictures all by myself in ‘64 and ‘65, but then I came upon the 1971 photo, when no one posed for the picture at all - it was just the baskets. Just three lonely little Easter baskets, lovingly curated by my mother — the same mother who stayed up late after we had gone to bed to make matching dresses for us and our dolls when we were little. The same mother who, judging from the look of this picture, couldn’t aim a camera for shit. You can’t see all of the basket on the left, but I promise you, they all contained the exact same thing, because Momma was very careful to always make everything equal. Except when Norah went through a non-chocolate phase, so she would get a white chocolate version of whatever it was Janelle and I got. This was back in the day when candy was king. Nowadays I suspect parents give their children Easter baskets filled with fruit, books and all-natural sugar-free jelly beans, which is reason enough for young people today being so nuts. You probably can’t tell, but the baskets in this picture contain a lamb and what looks like a baby deer, but they still have those crazy-ass eyeballs like they put on the chocolate bunnies. I never ate the eyeballs because they don’t even taste like sugar, they just taste like hard white stuff and red dye #2. Sigh. Those eyeballs are the stuff memories are made of.

So why do you suppose we didn’t pose with our baskets? Well, according to yourdateofbirth.com, I was almost 13, making my sisters 15 and 17. Three teenage girls. Three little know-it-all estrogen pumps under one roof. This explains so much, and it seems very clear that my sisters were way too cool to be posing behind some stupid Easter baskets. Fortunately, I did not require assistance from my sisters to create this year’s Then and Now photo. As a matter of fact, I didn’t need anyone’s help because I was able to figure out how to use the remote control feature on my Apple Watch to trigger the camera which is no easy feat whilst wearing white gloves.

Warning: Members of my family, especially my children, may find these images disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.

Happy Easter