Debra-Lynn B. Hook: Southern-born transplant to Ohio marvels: Isn't Easter supposed to be pretty?
Published in Lifestyles
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.”
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