Laneways and Rabbits

When we were small, we lived at the end of a laneway. There were two small single storey houses, and ours was the one with the red door. When my dad painted the door, he had to wash my sister from head to toe in white spirits because she jumped into the bucket of paint when he had his back turned a second. And I spoiled another bucket of paint by balancing three milk bottles on my head and dropping them as I went through the door on my return from the shops.

Easter morning meant surreptitious glances through the yellow curtains in our bedroom, trying to catch the Easter Bunny out. We knew that he was out there, but he was awful crafty. We would obediently wait in the living room, using whatever tricks we could for going into the bedroom for a quick peek, but we never caught him. All we saw was my parents coming back from the garden to tell us he was ready. Of course, I was far too old to believe in the Tooth Fairy in those days.

Sometimes, if the weather was nice, we would take the red plastic bath tub out doors and bathe in it. Our neighbours' uncle Christy would come along and present us with a Wispa egg, which was my favourite. Sometimes we would get the Walnut Whip instead, which my mother loved. Poor Christy didn't know where to look when we stood up in the bathtub clapping our hands excitedly and greeting him. Mrs Murphy always beamed at all six of us as we clambered around the tub naked to the sunshine, but once I caught her giving out to Bridget for not dressing her Sindy doll because it was "dirty, filthy dirty and a sin!" I found out it was also a sin to whistle in the house at Easter. Mrs Murphy said God didn't like whistling all the time cos he was so busy and he didn't have time to be always listening to people like me. I thought I'd better give him a bit of a break and went off to rollerskate around the laneway instead.

A few years we got to go to Galway for Easter to stay with our favourite cousins. They lived on the edge of the Burren, a limestone outcrop which harbours a mysterious mixture of antarctic flowers, bonsai trees, and magic wells. You can go out on the hills at night and find all you need for a good camp if you go along these well trails, but remember that you have to leave something behind for the next people, like a fresh lighter or a few quid.

The Burren is also home to many lost Easter eggs hidden by us over the years and never reclaimed. We used to go for walks with the baskets we'd woven from paper with my aunt, careful not to spill the little eggs my dad brought back from Holland or Italy. Somehow the weather would always be fine so we'd be able to play games of Postbox and Circus and go out and pick sloeberries for my Grandfather's winemaking. We always returned with a good big basket-full, despite having faces covered in sticky purple juice and mouths wrinkled from the sourness of the unripe berries. My mother was always presented with a bottle of the sloewine at the end, and she warned me that if ever I got a bottle off him when I was older to throw it out cos he made it with garlic.

Circus was possibly our favorite game. We would transform the garden and surrounding fields into a circus park and go off in gangs to make perfoformances and shows. The old abandoned rockingchair became "the twister", the shed became a haunted house. We used to put a ladder up to the roof and slide down on old fruit crates before landing heavily in the flower beds. There was a dress-up box in the loft and we would take all the stage make-up my aunt had and make ourselves up. I think our crowning glory was the halloween show we did on the open road, where we all dressed up as Leprechauns and played tin whistle and danced around with our convincing beards and silicon noses, scaring half the neighborhood cars off the road and creating a popular legend for the village.

My mam phoned me to wish me a happy Easter. I like the way that although we are not Christian, all holidays are embraced as days to enjoy and do something nice. I think that everyone should have the ability to enjoy them without feeling guilty for not appreciating Jesus enough or whatever. So I took myself off to the park today for a good read and a bit of sun and had a spot of lunch while watching the robins and green cockatoos fly around. And now I am off to have some Bunny soup.