Nostalgia Part One: Spring

Spring, here in Arcata, looks rather similar to just about every other season around here.

Does this look familiar?

But, every few weeks, a day will come along and look like this:

Alright, maybe it never looks QUITE like this.

And when that once a month sunny day comes along, since it's so out of place, instead of seeming normal it takes us whirling back to our childhood. The second house we lived in, in Hidden Valley, is where we lived the longest in one place with my parents and therefore where most of my memories of spring are from. Here are some things we remember.








Our springtime memories may vary from yours.

So much green!

The first sign of spring was always the tall grass that grew in our backyard. It always seemed to just pop up overnight. Dad would always wait until after Easter to weed wack so that we would have tall grass for our annual Easter Egg Hunt. The grass was followed by...

Tiny mushrooms!

They grew everywhere and seemed to make our yard more magical.  Personally, I remember looking at everything in the spring from about an inch away. 

A lot of my childhood memories look like this.

I remember Bry and I frequently wandering our yard with a magnifying glass just so we could see things in more detail.

Should have just invested in a pair of these.

After mushrooms came clouds. Or, rather, breaks in the clouds. Magically, one day the sky goes from looking like this:

Granted, I've never personally seen it look like this...

To looking like this:

Bry thinks this looks like a crab.

You could always tell that spring had arrived when there were more and more patches of blue in the sky. Along with blue skies, harmless white clouds and grass comes:

Wildflowers!

(When I was six, someone told me it was illegal to pick poppies... That's not true, right?)
What grew in our backyard were mostly:

Red clovers!

And a TON of:

Miner's lettuce.

Not only is miner's lettuce edible (and delicious) but it added hours to our playing time outside before we had to go inside. If anyone was ever curious why Bry and I were so thin and healthy during our childhood, here is one reason. Instead of running inside for soda, cookies or other unhealthy snacks, whenever we were hungry, when we were in our yard playing, we just bent down and grabbed some of this stuff.


Once flowers started growing it was always time for:

Allergy season!

Bry and I seemed to be (and for the most part continue to be) allergic to everything in the spring. In our back yard we had two of these:

The damn trees in our yard made up for not producing fruit by
dropping enough pollen to build a person on our yard.

The trees would make it up to us by doing this once a year:

In case you were curious, yes, that yellow carpet of leaves is ridiculously fun to play in.

When Bry and I were in kindergarten and elementary school, our parents made our teachers keep us inside during the spring so that we couldn't play outside and aggravate our allergies. That's right, we were those kids. The ones they make fun of on tv. One day in kindergarten, while we were sitting inside like this:

We would have had more fun in a bubble.

The whole cafeteria broke out into a food fight and Bry and I were the only kids who didn't get in trouble. We'd just been sitting in our classroom eating green grapes. 

And now, we arrive at the last important part of spring:

We actually had a rabbit that looked like the one on the left.

Easter! Even though my parents raised us pagan they still had us celebrate (to a degree) Christmas and Easter. For us, Easter simply meant two things:

Our baskets were so much better than this.

First thing Easter morning, the three of us kids would wake up and start searching the house. Unlike Christmas, Easter was allowed to start before our parents woke up. Why? Because the night before, after we'd gone to bed, our parents would have spent up to an hour finding just the right hiding places for our Easter baskets. Since Alia was younger than us by five years, hers was always the first we'd find. It would be some place easy like in a cupboard behind some pots and pans. For Bry and I, though, sometimes we actually had to give up and wait until our parents took pity on us and told us where they'd hidden our baskets. Different years we gave up only to be told to look in the oven or in the car. (They were desperate for new spots by the time they used the car.)

Our baskets were hidden like the message in this Magic Eye.
Can you find it?

Now, our Easter baskets weren't like other kids' Easter baskets. Our baskets didn't just come with candy. Our baskets were the stockings of Spring. Like our Christmas stockings, our Easter baskets always came with a new toothbrush. Always. To this day, for Christmas and Easter our mom still gives us toothbrushes twice a year.  

That brings us to the last part of spring!

What's up with the boy holding a pillowcase and the girl with a paper bag?

Easter egg huts! When we were little, our parents used to just hide eggs in super obvious places around the house. This probably continued until Alia was two at which point our parents started hosting Easter egg hunts for our friends, too. It was always amazing fun. Dad would leave all the grass uncut until after the party so that it was extra hard to find the eggs. Our mom would spend about a month filling little plastic eggs with toys and miniature candy. At the end of the day, mom would make sure to count all the eggs we'd found in order to make sure we'd found all the eggs they'd put out. We never did. We would always end up finding a few throughout the rest of the year. My parents were pretty good at hiding those damn eggs.

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