Easter Dinner

Mom, Dad, and I had an Easter Picnic at the Red Field today. It was a little too chilly to stay as long as we had planned, but it was really nice. We reclaimed one of the huge old cable spools my grandmother had long ago converted into a table, and, with the addition of some plastic lawn chairs, we had a dining set. I fried chicken in one of my heritage cast iron skillets and took it, and Mom made the rest of the meal: macaroni salad, baked beans, a salad tray with deviled eggs and veggies, and cornmeal muffins. I took one of my vintage 1940's cotton print luncheonette cloths to cover the table, and it was great. We had pecan pie for desert.

It wasn't a baked ham, fresh flowers, and bone china, but then again, we're not really that type of family. We can do that, and we have the stuff for it, but somehow, paper plates and the wide, hand-planed oak boards of the Red Field porch seemed to fit us better today. After we ate, we watched Mom and Dad's dog race around the field chasing birds, we talked, and we read until the wind just got too cold to bear. We left with a since of having made a good family memory.

The whole time we were there, I kept thinking about my grandmother. She would have loved it. Our eating there reminds me so much of summer meals when we used to have hay hauling dinners out in the pasture with big boilers of baked beans, huge baking dishes of macaroni and cheese, and sandwiches for the hay hands. I am looking forward to a long summer of picnicking up there and making new memories. If my friends can overlook the absence of indoor plumbing (it is a hayfield, after all), I want to share it with them, too. It's just a wonderful place.