This is a pagan story that happens at Easter. Or an Easter story that happens when pagans attend to the rites of spring. At any rate it has a little girl in bright clothing, grownups in shiny shoes with feathers in their hats, fruits and sweets and new laid eggs on the altar of a woven basket, and two little animals, the centerpiece of this day. Ultimately there will be a sacrifice.

It is Easter Sunday, sometime in the late 1930s. I am the little girl and I am dressed in a blue organdy frock with a lace collar and a big sash. I wear a dainty silver locket that my mother brought me from the Chicago World’s Fair. I have on white T-strap shoes and pale blue socks. There is an enormous bow around my head, and I carry a little white pocketbook with a hankie and two nickels in it. The ceremonies of the day began a short while before when I started my search through the back garden for colored eggs to gather for my basket. The Rabbit, I was told, and believed, had hidden them for me to find. (He had also colored them pink and blue and yellow). Adults in pretty outfits, dressy navy blue straw hats and the whitest of gloves stood on the back porch watching me. These were all ladies, my mother and great-aunts. The men of the family sat in the front parlor reading the Sunday Rotogravure, brushed and spruce in ties and white shirts. We would all shortly be going to church.

While I sat on the back porch steps, counting my eggs and eating jelly beans, one of my uncles brought me a cardboard shoe box with holes in the lid. He handed it to me and while everyone gathered around I held it tight. I could hear scratching and cheeping from inside, and in a second I had the lid off and into my hand flopped a tiny baby chick. It was colored a glorious fuchsia. It took my breath away, I can still remember. I had never had such a thing, a chick! And fuchsia? Next to it was another, colored green. I had no pets and was an only child besides. I must have thought, in some fashion, that here were companions, animal companions and we would be friends. And I was stunned by their color. I gathered grass to put in the box, we found something for them to eat, and I stared and stared at them. What else, in fact, was there to do with two baby chickens? I could hardly be gotten away to go to church, bragged about them in Sunday school, and thought of nothing else during the whole church service. (This was always beguiled away in any case, by rolls of Lifesavers, a stubby pencil and a little pad of paper from my mother’s handbag, and by counting the ruby panes in the stained glass windows.)

After church this celebratory day continued with the foods of the season, in abundance and served on the heirlooms of the house (there weren’t many). A leg of lamb on a big platter, peas, mashed potatoes (after all these were not really pagan days!), mint jelly, which I tried to push aside as ruining the good things, and homemade rolls with sweet butter. Everyone was in an apron, because we all still had our good clothes on and there would be dishes to do; later we would be taking a ride to see friends in the country.

We drove out of the city (not hard to do back then), to a rest home in the country where my great-aunt took a potted Easter lily to a friend. We drove on to another friend — the great-aunts knew a lot of country people, and we got our eggs and butter and milk and fruit from them. The fields were plowed, everything was green; maybe it wasn’t always, but that’s how I remember it. Dogwood, redbud and star magnolia all were blooming. Spring comes early in Kentucky. In the late afternoon we would drive back home, everyone a little tired and ready to take their finery off and read the Sunday papers. I had another treasure in my lap that I had been given by a friend we had just visited: a large, white pretend egg made of sugar, decorated with pink candy roses with a little window at the end to look in and see a pastoral scene of lambs and rabbits and flowers. This almost rivaled the chicks in importance. My bow had dropped out of my hair, I was rumpled, and my white shoes had grass stains on them. Time to put on a cotton dress and sweater and go to see my red and green chicks. It had been a nice Sunday, a nice Easter, a spring day full of promise.

The rites continued, the season progressed, the days lengthened. I touched the pussy willows, my favorite thing, and gathered some to put in a little whiskey jigger (which was where I saved things). Small clumps of greenery appeared in places that had looked dead; the roses were pruned. The chickens grew.

Do you know how long it takes a baby chick to turn into a good-sized bird with claws and a beak? Only a few weeks. Our symbols of spring and rebirth roamed the back yard, two awful large white birds with little touches of green and red on the ends of their feathers. They scared me to death, chasing me when I went outside, and I’d fly back into the kitchen, banging the screen door and hooking the lock, as though they would follow me in. Once they cornered me by the rose bush and pecked my leg. Why me and not the grownups I don’t know. Maybe being smaller I looked like fair game, and they had had after all, a pretty bad childhood. It was time for the sacrifice.

Town and country were not so separate back then. Chicken and egg farmers would bring in their products to the poultry house down at the Haymarket. This was an exciting excursion, and I would watch while my great-aunt would pick out a fat hen or a pullet from the pen of strutting, flapping chickens. This was killed and plucked for the customer right on the spot. At home we had our own executioner’s block, the stump of an old tree back by the wash-house with an axe lying on top of it, where once in a great while my great-uncle would kill a chicken that a friend in the country might have given us, or that he had come by some way or another. And this is where our red and green chickens ended their day. I watched from a distance, for a minute, then ran. I was no country girl. The next day they appeared on the Sunday dinner table, fried and surrounded by mashed potatoes and gravy. In my home, practicality reigned.

The rites were finished, Easter was over, summer was upon us.

Gazette contributor Jeanne Hewett is a fabric artist and freelance writer who lives in Edgartown.