Another American Adventure: Easter

Showing posts with label Easter. Show all posts

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Easter past and present

Not an Easter goes by that we don't remember the wonderful "Easter at Axel's" when we were in Germany in 2007 with our friends, Hartwig and Margret. Hartwig is one of the very few readers of this blog, so I want to remind him of how much we treasure and remember that Easter with his family.

The Photos from Easter at Axel's are HERE.

A description of the 2007 Easter Sunday, is HERE. We saw the sun rise in Prague, then drove the autobahn at record speeds back to Parsdorf so that we wouldn't be late for Easter dinner at Axel's, where we blessed the food chanting the German kindergarten grace:

Piep piep piep
Wir haben uns alle lieb! (we all love each other)
Bon Apetit!

Our friends and their children and grandchildren made this a very special day for us.

"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.