Growing up and then living in the Deep South for years as I did, Easter was synonymous with azaleas, temperatures in the 70s and children skipping through new spring grass looking for colored eggs.

Easter came in the spring, after all.

You know: Sunshine. Green trees. Bunnies, hopping down the bunny trail.

And then I moved to the tundra, aka northern Ohio, just south of Canada.

My first Easter here, wishful (unrealistic) thinking had me boiling, coloring and attempting to hide eggs in the back yard per usual.

Only thing, where there might have been bright azaleas, there were black brambles, which did nothing to camouflage colored eggs.

Where there might have been green grass, there was mud that the kids' patent leather Easter shoes sunk into.

I learned my lesson. Sort of. The next year I hid eggs in frozen flower pots and sent the kids out in galoshes.

They abandoned the uninspired sludge after five minutes, leaving me later to find forgotten eggs by smell.

I eventually learned to have Easter egg hunts inside or not at all, while continuing to engage in magical thinking regarding azaleas.

Somehow I had it in my head that, like a blade of grass growing up through a crack in the sidewalk, azaleas would bloom in northern Ohio before the spring equinox.

To my way of thinking, those springs that azaleas didn’t bloom constituted the aberration.

I planted two bushes and waited.

Until June.

I’ve been 26 years in Ohio now and I have given up on a real spring Easter, while occasionally considering escaping altogether.

I think of those apparently independently wealthy snow birds who forgo the whole winter for warmer climes.

I think, too, of my one friend who’d didn’t have a lick of money after college but nonetheless managed to avoid the worst part of early spring in Wyoming where she was a ski bum in winter and a park ranger in summer.

“There was ski season and there was park ranger season, and in between was what the locals called 'mud season' -- snow but not enough to ski. And you couldn’t jog. So my friends and I spent two weeks driving to California by way of Taos where I remember getting out and sitting in a courtyard, our eyes blinking in the sun like moles.”

My friend didn’t circumvent the entirety of mud season.

“But the world was stirring on our return.”

Certainly, I’ve been aware of options. I could go away like my friend, take my annual vacation in March instead of July, pretend there’s no such thing as an extended winter.

Or I could stay put, knowing that when the azaleas finally do bloom, I earned them.

In fact, I am neither independently wealthy, nor a 21-year-old in between semesters. I always had kids in school and other responsibilities that kept me tethered. This left me all these years with the mantra: “Bloom where you’re planted.”

In fact, I came to befriend most of the lingering Northern winter in general, as I leaned into the spirit of hibernation — a very long hibernation.

Just not Easter.

Easter is one day when it's supposed to be pretty, or at least warm, or at least not snowy.

I remind myself that I come from a long line of survivors. My ancestors were tough, the kind who escaped civil war in Lebanon to start a successful grocery store chain in Charleston. My grandfather on the other side of my family, so the story goes, walked from Mississippi to South Carolina to start a new life.

If they can do all that, I can get used to a little mud at Easter.

Of course, the irony of their bravery does not escape me: They left where things were bad to go where things were better.

It’s been all these years now. The kids are grown and out. Doesn’t keep me from dyeing eggs, and inviting the kids and their significant others for Easter baskets and the consideration of a few eggs in the sludge-filled backyard, even if nobody goes out there.

Doesn’t keep me, either, from holding out hope that one year the Easter bunny will bring warmth and sun along with jelly beans.

Of course, you can’t win for losing.

A warmer Easter would remind me there’s something to really be concerned about: climate change.

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