Easter Eggs Aren’t Just For Easter

Have you ever heard the term “Easter Eggs” in regards to movies and video games?

If you’ve got a teen or nerd (or both) in your household, then you probably have.

It doesn’t refer to actual Easter eggs. It refers to things hidden in your movie or video game. They’re usually random and have nothing to do with the actual movie or video game in which they’re found. It’s like a little wink at a pop reference or another genre and they aren’t obvious. If you blink, you’ll probably miss them.

An example would be when George Lucas came out with “The Phantom Menace”, the first installment in his prequels to “Star Wars”. He put E.T. in the movie in a nod to his buddy, Steven Spielberg.

There was no announcement about him doing this. There was nothing in the credits or even anything in the script. If you missed it, it’s because they were tucked in the bottom left corner of the screen in the scene in which they were featured.

That’s why they are called Easter Eggs. You have to hunt for them.

I have my own version of Easter Eggs at my house. It’s called “Spring Cleaning”.

Let me start this by saying I live with two hoarders collectors. The Husband Dude and Mini Me.

They have stuff. They like stuff. They keep stuff. They don’t throw away stuff.

Listen, I own my part in this. I could be a bitch and just go and throw stuff away. That’s just not me. I have also grown a bit lazy in my own clutter tolerance, so the house probably isn’t as neat and tidy as it should be. It’s ok. Nobody comes over anyway.

But…

Even I have my limits. A few weeks ago, I got inspired and cleaned out our linen closet and organized it. I have to admit, it felt really good and I was walking around for a few days like I had discovered a new country.

Or ran a marathon. Uphill. In the snow.

Or invented glitter.

That feels pretty damned good!

It motivated me to start looking at other areas of the house that were bothering me. In the past, I would attack an entire room, spend an entire day, and get completely burned out by the time I was done. Then, I wouldn’t do any more decluttering or organizing for six months.

This time around, I’ve been a little more low key. I’ve been paying attention to things that bother me about certain areas of the house, and then slowly going through those areas to figure out how to reorganize them so that they work better for us and they look neater and tidier. The kitchen counters are a big one for me. I want to clear them off and have a calm, pretty kitchen!

Anyway, back to the Easter Eggs. As I’m cleaning and decluttering and reorganizing, I’m finding things I forgot I owned. I found two pairs of suede high heel boots that I had put away in a plastic tub under the bed. I had forgotten how comfortable they are, even though they’re heels, which is one of the reasons I bought them in both brown and black and why I loved them so much. It’s too late to wear them this year, but I’ll have them in the Fall. It’s like going shopping in your own house!

There’s also another kind of Easter eggs I’m finding, but I’m used to this kind because I’ve been experiencing them for about eight years now.

After my mother died, we had to clear out her apartment and vacate it within just a few weeks after she died. We literally just threw things into boxes and threw them on a truck and unloaded them into our garage and spare room upstairs. The few pieces of furniture I kept came in the house and for a long time, I just tried not to think about all of that stuff.

I slowly started going through boxes over time, clearing things out and putting away those things I chose to keep, but you know that old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind”. Apparently, I missed a few things, because I have started to find “Easter Eggs” and it feels like Mom left them just for me.

A perfect example happened at Christmas, almost four years after Mom died. We were pulling out Christmas decorations and The Husband Dude walked in with two boxes that I didn’t recognize. I looked at them and saw my Mom’s handwriting on the side, “Christmas for Kathy”.

The boxes must have gotten mixed up with some of our other things in the garage and I just never opened them. So as we were decorating for this Christmas four years after Mom was gone, I opened one last Christmas present from her: a nativity scene.

When Mom was alive, she would give me a nativity scene every year for Christmas. She always started her Christmas shopping for the next year right after Christmas of the previous year, when everything was on sale. Because she died at the end of January, I can only surmise that she bought this nativity scene at some after Christmas sale and then put it away in her closet to give to me the next year, but then she died a few weeks later and the boxes got shuffled around so that I didn’t find them until four years later.

The surprises didn’t end there. Over the years, I’ve found notes in everything from her cookbook to a depression glass cookie jar that belonged to my grandmother.

What kind of notes? On recipes, she would write notes to herself about what worked and what didn’t, whether she added something or took it out, how much she used if she was feeding a certain size crowd.

For a woman who kind of hated to cook, she certainly was obsessed with getting it right!

The note I found in my grandma’s cookie jar was a note to me telling me it was my grandma’s cookie jar. Then there’s another note on a bowl and platter telling me those belonged to my other grandma and they were purchased at Woolworth’s for $0.50 each in 1935 as wedding gifts from my great-grandmother and great-aunt.

I also found a note in her jewelry box addressed to myself and my aunt (my mom’s sister, who died before Mom did, so obviously the note was written before my aunt passed). That note contained final instructions for cremating her and burying her next to my Dad and that if I died with her in an accident, then my aunt was to bury us both together in that plot.

That might seem morbid to most people, but I found it strangely comforting. She was so meticulous about everything and always had a plan. She even had a plan for the two of us if we died together.

I’ve lost count over the years of how many of these funny little notes I’ve found. Then, the other day, on one of my cleaning binges, I cleaned out the drawer of an end table of hers that I kept. I had obviously not touched it when I moved it because it was a little like a time capsule of things she left in it:

It brought back the memory of going into her apartment a few hours after she died, and seeing everything the way she left it. I’ll never forget seeing her half empty glass of water next to her chair and finding clothes in the dryer. She had left that last morning for work, assuming she would be coming home that afternoon, but she never came back.

It’s such an odd thing to think about, that you’re going about your daily business, your daily habits, and you don’t know if you’ll do them again a million more times or if this is the last time you’ll ever do them. I think about these things a lot now.

I found an Easter egg in my mother’s drawer when I was cleaning out her apartment. It was my grandmother’s bible (my dad’s mother). It’s one of those bibles that has the section in the center for your to add births, deaths, and marriages.

Most of the entries are in my grandmother’s old fashioned scrawl, starting with her marriage to my grandfather well over one hundred years ago. I never knew my Dad’s parents. They died before I was born. It was like getting a message from another time.

I noticed that later births and deaths were written in my mother’s school teacher script, starting with my brother’s birth, which occurred just a few weeks before my grandmother’s death.

The last three deaths – my mother, my dad’s younger brother, and one older sister – and one birth – Shane’s – are written in my messy handwriting. I decided those would be the last entries. There aren’t enough spaces to keep going and it completes three entire generations of Dad’s family.

I’ve also decided I need to start leaving some Easter eggs of my own. Maybe I’ll put notes with some of my jewelry and Mom’s jewelry so that the kids know what they are and where they came from. I’ll put notes on the backs of photos and maybe write funny stories to stash away in pockets and boxes in the closet.

Maybe I’ll buy a gift or two and just stash them away, to be opened later.

There’s always something of ourselves that we can leave behind. Right?