I keep our chickens on the side of the cabin, in a fenced area right below the kitchen window. It occurred to me the other day as I was doing dishes that the smell of chickens —that earthy, dirt-y, rural smell — conjures up all kinds of childhood nostalgia. Not because we had chickens, but because of the Onteora Community Church.
File it under the weird, wild Catskills — the old Onteora Church. It was up a winding, unpaved road near the Ashokan Reservoir, an area known for unspoiled, bucolic beauty. At the end of the road the wooded landscape opened to a stunning, many-acre farm with a large hay field, woods, and livestock. In the center was an old white church building with a small dirt parking lot and swing set. The chickens — the source of my aforementioned nostalgia — were often found pecking the ground outside the front steps.
The congregation was led by an older childless couple who owned the property: Evelyn and Mr. Morton. Mr. Morton's first name was Julian, but even if I knew that back then I'd never dare address him that way. Sassing Mr. Morton would result in a withering stare that held until you corrected yourself. My parents said he had spent some time in the military as a young man and never lost the rigidity of that way of life. He and Evelyn did all the farm chores themselves — caring for animals, chopping wood, haying the fields. At the time, I probably didn't appreciate just how tough they were, to live that way in the often unforgiving climate of the northeast.
The church was Baptist in designation, but all-are-welcome in practice —the parishioners an odd mix of kids and parents, old folks, and the occasional wayward upstate bohemian. My family itself was a mix, too: Jewish dad, Protestant mom, twin brothers twelve years my senior. There were several more … traditional churches near my childhood home, but I think my parents had a sense that this unique, countryside community would be the right place for us.
Like so much of the old Catskills, the Onteora Church was unclassifiably odd. It was the only church I ever attended, so its quirks were normal to me; I never questioned that "church" involved watching warbly taped-from-TV performances of country music (Mr. Morton was a connoisseur of Conway Twitty and Elvis). Or that when service ended you had to shake Mr. Morton's hand — always a terrifying prospect — before you could go visit the chickens. Or that Saturday evening bible study ended with a movie, usually a black and white classic, like Lassie. My mother tells a great story about those movies: Mr. Morton's inflexible approach to scheduling meant he would shut the movie off sharply at 9 — the end of the night — even if little Timmy was still trapped in a well. "He'd just lean over and turn it off and say 'goodnight everybody!'" she'd say, wiping away tears of laughter.
In summer the church held Vacation Bible School for local children. Vacation bible school is a term that will either elicit knowing nods from VBS grads, or puzzled looks by kids whose summers were devoid of holy-spirit-themed activities. For the uninitiated, I'll explain: It's equal parts summer camp and Sunday service, with a heavy emphasis on the kinds of traditional games you now find in Boston bars. VBS gave me not only my shuffleboard skills but also many handmade plaster plaques of Jesus that still fill my parent's garage. We'd do our crafts in the old machine shed, after morning bible study. Between activities we'd play on the old swing set near the parking lot, the hiss of cicadas echoing from the fields. Lunch often involved boiled hot dogs, made in huge batches in the Morton's tiny kitchen.
Mostly, I loved VBS. The Mortons were the first farmers I ever knew and their property was a child's dream. Farm animals, deep woods with old cabin buildings, a playground with a basketball hoop, barns… the only thing the town recreation camp had on VBS was an ice cream truck.
Of course I thought most of the religious stuff was horribly uncool, as most kids would. The hymns — "Glory to God", "What A Friend We Have in Jesus" — well, they weren't on any of my friend's mix tapes. And that only got worse the older I got. As a teenager, I probably would've called myself an atheist, or avoided the question in some cheeky way, like my habit of writing "Old Norse" whenever a form asked for my religion. But even in that period I understood there was something special about the Mortons. If there was tragedy, or someone died, Evelyn and Mr. Morton showed up at that person's doorstep with a basket of food and a no-strings offer to help. I think now of the fresh flowers they placed up in front of the pews, in remembrance of Mrs. Morton's parents. The flowers were there every Sunday, along with others placed by churchgoers in memory of people who had passed away. The Onteora Community Church was one of few places where I heard people say the names of people who died out loud, even years later. Everywhere else it seemed like you were just expected to move on, to forget.
Lots of families went through the Onteora Church, and I'm sure we all have our own special memories of that place. But most will agree that the truly unforgettable part was Easter Sunday. April in Upstate New York has a raw beauty to it; the Morton's farm was always especially striking this time of year, the bare trees revealing a backdrop of almost-green mountains. And everything under that big, robin-egg blue sky.
Every Easter it was the same. We'd start inside with a church service, the heavy scent of lilies mingling with the old book smell of the red-edged hymn books. We'd stand at the end to sing a closing hymn — "How Great Thou Art" or "Up From The Grave He Arose." After that all the kids would rush to the door, shaking hands with Mr. Morton quickly, to burst into the field for the main event: the Easter Egg Hunt.
The rules of the hunt were always laid out afresh at the end of Easter service: eggs are hidden in the main field, not the woods or buildings. There are a thousand eggs hidden in the big field. That detail was always very specific: one thousand, not more and not less. "Is it really a thousand eggs?" the kids would ask. Mr. Morton would nod in that authoritative way — no nonsense, like a soldier. "That's what I said, better get out and start looking!"
Of course, not all of the eggs were actually eggs. They were all egg-ish at least. There was a tiered hierarchy — the least valuable being oblong, brightly colored marshmallow candy wrapped in tin foil. These were easily spotted, shining under the overwintered hay. They were also disgusting: grainy, and devoid of any discernible flavor aside from "sugar packet." Of course you'd still pick them up and eventually eat them, like the packages of Necco wafers at the bottom of a treat or treat bucket.
Then there were the plastic eggs. These are the same eggs you find today, the ones that make a satisfying plastic-y pop when opened. They were usually filled with jelly beans, and most often found in the nooks of old trees.
Next came actual eggs. The regular dyed ones were the standard, then the glittery ones, and lastly the best-most-rare: eggs wrapped with a printed plastic decoration. Despite my begging and pleading, My parents never bought this kit for us to use — I think it involved some sort of terrible, smelly plastic-heating process. There were only a few of these in each hunt so if you got one you'd try to preserve the plastic image by cutting it off with great care. I recall a scene with Beatrix-Potter-like rabbits sitting on my childhood bookshelf, the plastic still holding the shape of the now-lost egg.
Lastly, there was the "special" egg: singular, just one. Special was left undefined, different every year. You'd run up to Mr. Morton with your find — maybe one of those glittery eggs, or something of an unusual color. "Is this it? Is this the special egg?" He'd just shake his head and say, keep looking! Whoever found that year's special egg got a fifty dollar prize. Fifty dollars. This was an almost unfathomable sum to a 1980s child, the cost of something from the near-end of the Sears toy catalog: those mythical toys only the children of millionaires must get. It was a magical thing, the special egg.
There were years and years of those Easter egg hunts — some when spring came early, a warm sun at our backs, and some that felt more like a winter day, snow flurrying through the air. I don't remember the last egg hunt we attended; I suppose that's how these things go. Does anyone remember the last time they went trick or treating? The very last family vacation? Time moves fast in childhood, and even faster as adolescence approaches. One year you're carrying your basket of eggs and the next it all feels so passé, so immature you can hardly remember ever having liked it. Then ten years, twenty years pass and you miss it.
Many years later I saw Evelyn in a pharmacy parking lot. I was a college student home for the summer and I recognized her right away, in her usual smart bellbottom pantsuit — she was only a bit grayer than in my memories. I expressed my condolences; my father told me Mr. Morton had died, a heart attack struck him as he was chopping wood in the backyard. It's how I'd expect someone like him to want to go, taking care of his homestead. We spoke for a few minutes — the usual pleasantries and how-have-you-beens. She told me she still lived at the old church property. I said it was one of the most beautiful and special places I had ever known. I asked her, "I have to know... was it actually a thousand eggs at Easter?" I had mostly accepted this was a fanciful lie, the sort of thing you tell children that makes the world seem better or kinder, like Santa Claus or the Easter bunny.
To my surprise she said, "Yes, it was. Every year. We counted them ourselves, in sets of 10, before they went out to the field. A whole group of us together, every Easter."
I never did win the special egg myself in all those years of egg hunting. Looking back now, I realize that the children who found the special egg were often from families that didn't seem to have a lot themselves. One year it was a couple and their young son, who had just moved to the area. Another year it was the youngest in a family who was known to be down on their luck. Was that the secret of the special egg? That there never was any one egg; the Mortons just bestowed that gift on someone who they thought needed a bit of luck, something special, in their life? Both of the Mortons are gone now, so I'll likely never know the truth. But that's okay. Some things are best left as mysteries.
Now that I own a large rural property I've thought about holding a similar type of annual event, after the pandemic has ended. I can imagine reliving that joy, in the same way new parents experience the excitement of Christmas again through the eyes of their children.
Getting older can be a painful process; It's usually marked by the realization that life is more complicated, sadder, and harder than anyone told you. Sometimes those pure memories come back bittersweet, as you look back on them with adult eyes. There's no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny. "You can do anything you want to do in life" ends up being a lot more complicated in practice than in theory. The games we play growing up teach us that things are fair, or at least predictable — when life is neither of these things. Sometimes the years can feel like nothing but hard lessons, one after the other.
And sometimes you find out it really was a thousand eggs, just like they said.
A Thousand Easter Eggs
Your writing is always a treat for the senses. I attended VBS in a different part of the country, with its own set of nostalgic oddities, and you captured the feeling of it perfectly. You rustled up some rusty parts of my heart with this one, it reassured me more than I expected to hear that the egg hunt legend was true.