Today is Easter, 2021. I was looking through my long list of post topics to write and this one was the first I saw. It seemed appropriate.
It was March, 2020. The pandemic had confined most of my friends and me inside our homes. We already had celebrated St. Patrick’s day on zoom and I wanted to do something special for Easter. I liked the idea of an Easter egg hunt, but wanted to make it socially distanced. Also I thought it might be nice to do it publicly so that other people could join in on the in the neighborhood.
But how to keep it safe?
After brainstorming for a while I decided to skip the real eggs in the grass idea and instead do chalk eggs on the streets. That way we could spread it out over the entire neighborhood. In April 2020, walking outside was still discouraged by some people and others said it should be fine if you keep your distance. A few friends declined to participate but some others were up for the idea. But since some friends were rather vehement in their declining I decided not to promote it to the neighbors because I didn’t want to put myself out there as a dumping ground for everyone’s pandemic hate and frustration. If they came upon the eggs they could enjoy it but I wasn’t going to put my name on it.
So I knew it might just be my friends and I enjoying it, but that was still a-ok with me. But that did mean that we couldn’t go around hiding the eggs as a group. We’d have to split up.
I wanted to make sure we had at least one egg per street. That would make it more likely that passerbys would see more than one egg and realize it wasn’t a one off. It might spark their curiosity. To help send the signal “Hey there’s more of these” I also decided we should draw a number on or by each egg.
Here’s the instructions I sent people:
There was also a letter on each egg. If you found all the eggs and then put the letters in the order of their associated numbering, it would spell out a message. This wasn’t explained anywhere, you just sort of had to be curious enough to ask, “Gosh, why is there a letter and number on this egg?” and then try to come up with the answer.
I sent each friend a list of 3 eggs to be drawn. They didn’t get to see each others’, though. Here’s the full list:
It was a kind of a dreary morning and it had rained the night before but we managed to get the eggs put out in the early morning. It was kind of a drag to do so much work and not be able to tell people about it. I thought to myself “next year!” Unfortunately I totally forgot about this until today. So.. next year!!
Here’s a few more photos of our work.
