Easter Memories, Depression Days

By DORIS SAIGEON Banning
California

I just want to share with my friends what Easter means to me (childhood memories), during the depression days of years ago.
I was born in 1927 in a small Mormon town, Ferron, to Annie (Rasmussen) and Leland Bohleen-who at that time was a full time sheepherder in Colorado-later on when I was 13, he came home to try farming a small, desert type farm called “Dutch Flats” way down near a smaller town named Molen.
The first Easter I remember especially was when a bunch of us kids hiked up into the foothills near the Indian cliff dwellings on the far side of town. We carried our lunches in paper bags. One little girl and I think her name was Lemon, rolled her colored Easter eggs down the hill with ours and her eggs splattered all over the rocks below. We started to laugh.
“My mama doesn’t allow me to eat hard-boiled eggs. They aren’t good for you,” she told us with tears in her eyes. She thought we were making fun of her. We weren’t but I hugged her and said not to worry that it was OK. Her soft boiled eggs and her tears have stayed with me in memories for over 70 years now.
People are still making others cry over silly things nowadays. I got a mean-spirited letter last week from an old friend from my childhood and she made tears come to my eyes too. Mostly because she was critical of my choice of churches. What she did not and probably would not have cared about anyway, was it had been a hard week for me as I lost a dear sister-in-law to cancer, and I had already shed a lot of tears over that.
Why do we all have to be so judgmental? And so critical? Life is hard enough these days, with so much bad news in the papers and on TV and growing older brings so much pain and aches and stress to our aging bodies.
The kids will soon be hunting Easter eggs in the parks on the Saturday before Easter and celebrating in different ways.
Let’s remember the true meaning of Easter is to follow Christ’s examples and to be kind and gentle and forgiving.