Thy Praise Shall Never Fail

Our Easter was beautiful. Yes, the day before Easter is exhausting (cooking, cleaning, ironing, mending, wrapping, dyeing, preparing) but the payoff is sweet. 

I woke before dawn and watched the sky pinken over the silvery pond, then drank my coffee and drove north to church.  At our sunrise service we decorate a cross with flowers, and this year because Easter is so late, we didn't have any daffodils. It was all azaleas, pink dogwood blooms, yellow kerria japonica, my offering of a few late pink and white tulips, and the icing on the cake: loads of gorgeous purple lilacs. After sunrise service I always walk up to visit my mother's grave, and yesterday I found hundreds of violets growing all around it.  Beautiful!

Our egg dyeing this year was limited to shades of blues.  I enjoyed that. 

I used our white Noritake china ("Stoneleigh") for breakfast and hot beverages, and champagne flutes for a Perrier-orange juice combination. 

We all got dressed for church and miraculously left on time, but not before I tucked a few white azaleas into Annie's hair.  Her Easter dress is yellow dotted swiss, made by my Grandma Polly over 30 years ago for me, and features a wide collar and sweet heart-shaped buttons down the back.  Delicious! The azaleas were a good fit, because my grandmother had hundreds in her garden in Charleston. My father tends them now!

At church I took my usual notes, and also scribbled the last stanza of "Crown Him with Many Crowns" into my church journal--because it was ineffably sublime. 

Easter dinner at my in-laws': I think my favorite dish was the whole (tops on!) carrots just roasted in the oven.  This incarnation of the lemon sponge cake turned out well, but I squished too much whipped cream out, so it was a little wimpy on the cream.  I think if I make one more sponge roll, I will have gotten sponge rolls out of my system for a while.  

The children had their annual Easter egg hunt on the lawn, we FaceTimed my niece (in her freshman year of college in faraway Georgia), and when we got home in the early evening a rainbow was arching across the valley behind the house.  

*               *              * 

Crown him the Lord of years,

the potentate of time,

creator of the rolling spheres,

ineffably sublime.

All hail, Redeemer, hail!

for Thou hast died for me; 

thy praise shall never, never fail

throughout eternity.