Columnist Susan Snyder: Putting the right spin on Easter

Friday, April 18, 2003 | 4:33 a.m.

For most people, Easter is a time of rebirth, reflection and new hats that go into the closet after church and into the yard sale after Memorial Day.

At our house, it was more like April Fool's Day.

Easter pregame was Saturday. Mom tried to hard-boil a dozen eggs without cracking any. Some years she succeeded. Other years my brother and I fought over who would color the one with the tumor.

Our Easter miracle was seeing the whole kitchen table cleared off for egg dyeing. (Mom quit doing housework when I was 7. The house was a train wreck, but her migraines went away.)

With the faint smell of the dye vinegar tickling our noses, we colored the eggs pink, blue, green and purple. We wrote our names with a wax crayon, then dyed over it so the names would appear. We covered them with bunny decals.

Then my brother dipped one or two into all the colors to create an icky brown. He'd have made them all brown, if left unattended.

Boys.

We put them in the refrigerator and saved them for Easter morning, when we would awake and test the only law of physics I ever understood: Hard-boiled eggs spin fast on the counter; raw eggs do not spin at all.

Every year 13 eggs sat where we had put only 12, and Dad was intensely interested in which ones the rest of us were going to crack and eat. I grew up thinking normal people spun eggs before they ate them.

We had an Easter egg hunt with our cousins, Beth and Jeff, but we did it only once because our fathers were untrustworthy.

In central Indiana, Easter arrived with two givens: You would have a new spring dress; and it would be too cold and rainy to wear it.

Beth, our two brothers and I sat in a bedroom while our dads hid plastic eggs in the yard under a fine drizzle. Each egg had candy or quarters inside. We hunted for about an hour until we figured we'd found them all.

But my dad said there was one more. Beth's dad said it had money in it.

Our teenage brothers had lost interest. But Beth and I went back out and searched for the money egg in what had become a driving rain.

As you already have surmised, our dads "miscounted." There wasn't "one more egg."

The last big Easter at our house happened when I was about 13. My brother was in college and came home a few times a year to do laundry. On Easter weekend he arrived with a box.

It peeped. I squealed. Dad said no.

Ducks -- even fuzzy little yellow ones -- are livestock, and I absolutely, positively was not allowed to keep them.

We built a pen in the backyard with a plastic wading pool for a pond. Ralph and Gertrude grew fat and happy. We had them about a year until Dad insisted they go live on a real farm where they would be happier.

We moved to Florida. I grew up, and Easter became just another Sunday on which Dad and I took our weekly bike rides. We pedaled along the Intracoastal Waterway, went to breakfast, talked about stuff. Our last Easter ride was in 1985. An aneurysm in his brain struck without warning the next day.

Life happens. Death does too. Life goes on.

Laugh often. Don't let the rain stop you.

And always, always spin your eggs.