Egg Hunting, Or, We're Grown-Ups, We Swear

Today was Easter. Most of the people in my dormitory and in my general acquaintance took the opportunity to flee back home to spend the holiday with their families. A number of us remained, from general unobservantness, poverty, convenience and in my case, the feeling that I'd JUST had spring break and my parents really deserved a weekend to themselves. (Also, my roommate went to Costa Rica and left me all alone in a double-sized room. It's huge. And comfy. I have two beds. The incentives for going home have decreased significantly just there.)

However, all was not well. Even for me, happily agnostic, Easter had some significance. Admittedly, said significance ran more along the lines of hunting small brightly colored objects filled with delicious sugar. Indeed, the Easter Egg Hunt was a big deal for my family. I think this was because my parents thought that it was good practice, finding things being a useful skill. Or, more likely, because both of them had an absolute blast hiding things in the orchard and then watching their daughter rattle around like a stoned squirrel, looking for them.

My parents were absolutely devilish when it came to hiding eggs. A favorite trick was a lilac egg in the wisteria. Often, I'd walk past an egg six or seven times before finding it, even with them calling hints. But the hiding places weren't the real difficulty.

My parents would forget where they hid the eggs.

They had put so much effort into concealing the eggs that they would be incapable of finding them again. So the Easter Egg Hunt would become a more or less yearlong thing, often culminating in a surprise plastic egg to someone's head six or seven months later. It was a good thing that the average Snickers' bar has a shelf life equivalent to the lifespan of your average hydra.

So, doing homework today, I felt there was something fundamentally missing from the day. One of my friends felt similarly, and arming ourselves with two bags of cheap candy (and six individually wrapped teabags) from the only grocery store within five miles, we called up our friends and headed out to the bioswale (artificially created marsh, designed to handle runoff) behind our dormitory. We split up into teams, each team taking a different picnic area, and went about hiding our candy.

It was a lot of fun. We hid teabags under picnic tables, candy eggs in bushes, Jolly Ranchers in flowers. At the end, I found myself with one candy egg left. I decided to tuck it in a depression by a deserted-looking groundsquirrel burrow, and we went back to meet up with the others.

We searched for their candy first, and rapidly discovered that an easter egg hunt in your own backyard is very different from one on a college campus. We found all the eggs there, certainly. We also found a broken cell phone, two beer bottles, a bottle lid, and a used condom. We had similar luck with the other area. It was awesome. We're definitely doing it again, but next time we're using plastic eggs, because it decreases the chances of a small mammal nicking our candy before we can get at it. (Candy egg by squirrel burrow? Never found. Here's hoping that the peanut butter/chocolate ratio is such that the squirrel won't experience too many ill-effects.)

Yeah, we're totally responsible adults.