April's Edition of The Hatchery
This month's prompt: "The truest thing we've ever spoken"
Last month I launched a little idea of mine called The Hatchery.
Here’s the gist of it: once a month, I’ll offer up a prompt for any and all who would like to participate. You can take that prompt and interpret it however you like. Maybe you respond with a picture or a poem or a song or a drawing or a casserole. And then we will use the comments section down below to share our offerings with each other. If you have your own Substack or other website where you have your prompt response posted, copy and paste the link so we can all check it out and celebrate it with you. It’s simply a space here in Nooks & Crannies each month where we can offer up our creative gifts to one another. I hope you’ll join us!
Welcome to this month’s experience in The Hatchery. Your prompt is the following phrase: “The truest thing we’ve ever spoken.”
Have fun, friends! The following is my offering to get us started…
What I needed then was to relieve my conscience, which could no longer bear up under the guilt of knowing that the neon plastic grass that I stuffed into each of my children’s Easter baskets would end up not only in my clothes dryer’s filter, my vacuum cleaner, my hairbrush, and my sock drawer, but it would eventually find its way to a land fill where it would outlast not only myself, my children, and my grandchildren, but possibly the whole Silva-Smucker line throughout the generations.
Add to this guilt my ever increasing irritation with the candy industry and it’s continuous attempts to overreach its bounds and infiltrate our homes with pounds upon pounds of sickly sweet nougat and red #3 not only during Halloween, but throughout Thanksgiving (candy corn), Christmas (candy canes), Valentine’s Day (candy hearts), and Easter (candy everything), till our homes are forever brimming with buckets, stockings, decorated shoeboxes, and baskets of the stuff.
I’d had enough. So once and for all I put the squash on Easter baskets in our household.
Now, before you cry out on behalf of our children at the injustice of it all, let me set you straight on two points.
First, in lieu of Easter baskets, they each get their very own box of “sugar cereal” (as we in our house call any cereal with 6 grams or more of sugar in it), a treat that rarely graces the shelves of our kitchen cupboards. Yes, I’m well aware that there’s still sugar involved here. But its consumption will only last over the course of a week at most. And there are those “whole grains” that the front label touts as well as the occasional grams of fiber and fortified vitamins thrown in there that somehow make the option feel a bit more righteous. I know, I know. It’s a flimsy argument. But there’s no plastic grass involved so that’s a win.
Secondly, their grandmother owns a candy shop, which means approximately two hours and ten minutes after they polish off their box of cereal at home, we will arrive at their grandparents’ house where they will embark on a good ole’ fashioned Easter egg hunt that will reward them with a basket full of every sweet known to humankind. This candy will linger around our house for days, weeks, and maybe even months. And all my efforts to keep the sugar industry from infiltrating every 365 days of the damn year will be fruitless.
But it’s always worth a try.
Yesterday, I made the yearly pilgrimage to the grocery store to pick up our babes’ cereals and, yes, I was assisted by our home equity line of credit for this purchase, because, holy smokes, groceries aren’t getting any cheaper! I bought 10 boxes of cereal this year because we have two extra “significant others” joining our numbers thanks to our oldest two children. The Silva-Smucker clan is growing, and we love it.
While at the grocery I stumbled upon a can of plant-based Spam. One of the great sacrifices I made when I went vegetarian 8 years ago was no longer indulging in my father’s Spam musabi, a culinary delight subsisting of dried seeweed, rice, and the world famous mystery meat Spam, and a part of his regular diet while growing up in Hawaii. To the uninitiated it may sound unappetizing, but those of us who have been treated to a taste of it know better.
As I slipped the pea-proteined version of Spam into my grocery cart, I wanted to call my dad and tell him about my discovery. “What?!?” he would have gasped into the phone. “You think it’s any good? Bring it next time you come and we’ll see what it’s like in musabi!” He was always a great supporter of my many food crusades, whether against sugar or meat or whatever new campaign I cooked up.
But I didn’t call my dad. Instead, I gathered up my trove of cereals and headed home.
Late on Holy Saturday night, Shawn and I will write each of our babes’ (and their others’) names in Sharpie upon their cereal and hide the boxes throughout the house. Then Sunday morning, they will awake and begin scavenging under sofas, in closets, atop light fixtures, behind couch cushions, and through piles of laundry for their breakfast with only Shawn’s directives of “hot” or “cold” leading them to their quarry.
But then comes the best part of the whole tradition.
We will all sit down together around our big farm table and we will eat and tease each other about our cereal choices and bargain for a bowl of your cereal in exchange for a bowl of mine. We will bring up memories from Easter’s past and laugh and eat and laugh some more.
And this year, I need this tradition. I really need it. In fact, I need all that Easter has to offer.
It is our first Easter since my dad died, so I’m hungry for every ounce of it that I can get:
the crisp blue of an early spring morning,
our dramatic house-wide cereal hunt,
the bowls of Fruity Pebbles swimming in milk (because, damn, it does taste good),
the jokes around the table,
the hustle and bustle of showers and teeth brushing and getting ready,
the loud conversations taking place over each other on the drive to church,
the hugs of friends as we enter the sanctuary,
the hymns,
the sermon,
the consolation,
the hope,
the resurrection,
the words “He is Risen; He is Risen, indeed.”
Said in unison.
Said like we believe it.
Said like it’s the truest thing we’ve ever spoken.
Happy Easter, friends! I hope you’ll share your musings down in the comments below!