Sometimes, Mom smiles at a job well done and says,”You’re a good girl.” Sometimes, she laughs at the t.v., or at a joke with a sister, girlfriend, or Nanny.

Mom smiles when there’s a happy time, like when we celebrate her day with a birthday cake, or in springtime, when we decorate an Easter egg tree in the yard.

It isn’t Easter without an egg tree. My sisters and I hang colored plastic eggs strung with string on a young birch tree alongside our subsidized driveway of our subsidized house. Sometimes, Mom hangs them by herself if the four of us run, helter-skelter, curling our fists, from what we saw as another chore.

The eggs seem lonely to me then.

Sometimes, I hang them by myself, in a mood to save one of a handful of family traditions and a handful of happy times. I am a good girl. Mom doesn’t have the time because of the hand God dealt her, or she doesn’t feel good, or, she’s just not in the mood, so I do it.

“God is good,” says Mom when she sees the yellow, blue, green, pink, orange, and purple eggs swish-and-sway among the new spring-green leaves and the dark splotches of uncurled bark of the tree trunk. Happiness is in the tree.

I will go to my Easter God today.