Broken but Beautiful

It's 10:20 on Thanksgiving night, so of course my thoughts are of Easter.

It was the early 70's, and every week, my mom and my grandma would go to ceramics.  My mom painted something for everyone and every holiday.  For herself and my other grandma, she made a big green Christmas tree that lit up with little plastic lights.  My sisters and I fought over who got to put the lights in the holes each year.  Mom made a full-sized jack-o-lantern and an Easter bunny and a Santa head candy dish and an Easter baskets with a lid that she put jelly beans in every year.  She made a snow house that also had little lights that lit up and a pumpkin candy dish and mugs for my sisters and me that looked like a the pocket on a pair of blue jeans.  

But my favorite and most treasured item that she ever made was a ceramic Easter egg.  Each of us girls got one.  Mine was purple, Colleen's was pink, and Jennifer's was blue.  Mom glued ceramic flowers and leaves on the top of the eggs, mine were dogwood flowers, and a bunny sat on top in the middle.  The lid of each egg lifted off, and we would put Easter grass inside and put them out with our baskets every year.  The Easter bunny would leave little treats in them, like Santa did with our stockings.

I don't remember when I took mine home with me, but after Mom died, it became one of my most precious items.  It's signed, "Love, Mom 1973" on the bottom.  I was so afraid it would break, that I didn't pack it away with my regular Easter decorations. Instead, it sat on the top shelf in the bottom cabinet of my hutch next to the music box my grandma bought for me the year she died, a glass pumpkin Emily blew with her "one digit breath" on her 9th birthday, and a Christmas rocking horse music box Mom gave me that plays "Toyland," a song that even made me cry when I was a little girl.  During the Easter season, the egg sat on the mantle up and away from the possibility of anyone knocking it off the end table.  I lived in fear that it would break.

And break it did.  

This week, I needed some dishes from the same cabinet, bottom shelf, where my egg lives most of the year.  When I opened the door to get them, the egg fell out and shattered.  Some papers from the drawer above it had fallen out the back of the drawer and onto the top shelf, pushing the egg to the edge and out onto the floor when the door was opened.

I cried.  Forty-six years of Easters flashed before my eyes as I looked at the egg in pieces on the floor.  My sister helped me gather them up and put them on the hutch.  Tonight, I decided to try and glue them back together.  The pieces didn't fit together exactly right.  No matter how many ways I tried to maneuver things, I couldn't get them to fit smoothly. You can obviously see the lines where the pieces are glued, and there are little spaces where the ceramic turned to dust when it broke.  But it's back together.  The rabbit is once again sitting in the middle of the dogwood flowers, smiling just like he always did.

I think there is a life lesson in here somewhere, something about life knocking us around sometimes when we least expect it and breaking us into pieces.  About putting ourselves back together, even if the pieces don't fit perfectly, and you can see the scars where we've been hurt.  I think when I put this out next Easter, on the mantle, I will think of my mom and myself, and the things we've been through in our lives and how even though we've been broken time and again, we were and are still beautiful.