Easter Rising

Here is an old chestnut from my story trove appropriate, I hope for the season. As an added bonus, a few Easter illustrations not connected to the story follows:

Easter Rising

She was born on Easter almost nine years before, so it was Lily Jessica’s favorite time of the year. Even though the two celebrations hardly every coincided exactly, the family always observed her birthday on Easter Sunday, after the egg and candy hunt on the farm and after the trip to church.

Maybe it was mistake to have the two special parties at once for Li’l Jessie, as she was called, was sometimes wound tighter than a 34-inch belt on a 38-inch waist. Now we call it attention deficit disorder, but back then, it was simply called being naughty. And back then, there were real consequences.

On this Saturday night, it was like closing a barroom on St. Patrick’s Day for the adults to get her and her cousins Maggie and John to bed by 9 o’clock. Mommy and Daddy had looked forward to a quiet evening with her younger brother, Uncle Joey, and his wife, Aunt Maria, watching professional basketball players compete for the collegiate championship. Daddy had carefully set the funny alarm clock -- the one that was shaped like a chicken and clucked morning wake-ups like Alanis Morissette on crack – to sound at 7:30 Easter morning.

At 9:43, Lily crept halfway down the stairs and sat with her hands gripping the banister staves and trying to watch the game.

“L.J! Back to bed!” called her father.

“But Daddy, the alarm clock went off by mistake and I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

Daddy excused himself, scooped L.J. up with a gentle hand under the seat of her lamb-jumping-over-the-fence PJs. He put her back to bed, as Maggie and John slept, and warned her to stay put. Or else.

No one knows whether it was the faulty clock again or something wired into Li’l Jessie’s behavior control center, but at 2:57 a.m., when Daddy came to the kids’ room to check on Maggie’s moaning – she was having a nightmare about stones – he noticed that his own daughter was not in her bed. Frantic, he roused Mommy and Maria and Joey. Turning on all the lights, including the flood lamps that could have lit their neighbor’s Field of Dreams, Daddy found  Lily Jessica squatting at the edge of the cornfield.

“WHAT IN GOD’S NAME ARE YOU DOING OUT HERE, YOUNG LADY!!!”

Shivering, she peeped that the alarm clock had gone off again by mistake and since she couldn’t go back to sleep she thought she would get a head start on the Easter egg hunt. Mommy, Joey and Maria sighed in relief, and then headed back to the big house, leaving Daddy alone with his little girl. And not much for either of them to say.

“I am angry with you, Li’l Jessie,” he said in sorrow. “You had us worried to death, and you have been disobedient ever since supper. You showed an extreme lapse of judgment.”

He took the tiny wicker basket from her hand and set it down, then hoisted himself on a hay bale. Her face crinkled like a tin can imploded by a vacuum cleaner, and faster than a tornado finding a trailer park,  the dark curls on her head were flying toward the rich Iowa soil as Daddy turned LJ across his own lap of judgment. Down came the prancing lambs on her PJ bottoms and down came her father’s strong hand.

It wasn’t a long spanking, and not particularly hard, but it had to happen for Lily Jessica to be able to pay full attention to the joy of  her Easter/birthday celebration free of guilt and ready to grow into another year -- a year that began with Daddy sitting on the side of her bed at 7:30 a.m. when the clock crowed a third time and she rose again.

The End
and more