“Let’s go pick some forsythia, Jeanne,” said Mom.  She grabs the kitchen scissors and heads to the backyard.  I follow her outside, into a sunshiny April day.

The wildly overgrown forsythia bush, bursting with yellow-popcorn flowers, yields to Mom’s hand as she cuts a bunch of branches and gives them to me.  Mom rooted this bush from cuttings of a bush in Aunt Matheline’s yard, years ago.  It is so large that we are hidden from view by drivers in cars stopped at the red traffic light at the street intersection.  I become part of the bush as I close into the flowers, in their promise of a hopeful spring.  The bush is part of Mom’s crooked path to grasp some type of privacy in the corner lot of our yard and life.

“A-tisket, A-tasket, I lost my yellow basket.  Won’t someone help me find my basket and make me happy again?  Was it green?” sings Mom.

“No, no, no, no,” I sing back the refrain of an old song that Mom learned as a young girl.

“Was it red?”

“No, no, no, no.”

“Was it blue?”

“No, no, no, no.”

Back in the kitchen, Mom loops eggs, birds, rabbits, and floral decorations onto the bright branches in a vase, to make an Easter tree centerpiece for our dinner table.  Easter is here, in the colors of yellow, green, red, blue, and, most of all, in the pink, of my very own Easter basket.