Easter and springtime

I went into this Easter being a little bit nervous, mostly because it was the first Easter (or any real holiday, for that matter), that I wouldn't be spending with most of my immediate family. It felt weird, and grown-up, and on Friday when a few of my other friends made the trek towards home, I got a tiny bit homesick. But my Easter ended up being better than I could have hoped. It was spent with my new family, my family of ME grad students.

I went to church in the morning with 3 other ME grad students. After church, we went to Liz's house and had a brunch. 14 of us gathered there, ate LOTS of food, sipped on mimosas, and told stories of past Easters, embarrassing moments, family squabbles, travels, and Justin Bieber. We did not talk about anything engineering related! We laughed and ate and bonded as a unit of people who couldn't make it home for Easter, and were in the same difficult walk of life that included being college grads who haven't quite started the rest of our lives yet.

After brunch, I did homework of course. After about an hour and a half, I was looking out the window and saw a mother duck with a flock of baby ducks trying to cross the parking lot directly below me.

As a bit of a backstory, I've been waiting to see baby ducklings like, since January. Dave told me that there are usually swarms of ducklings around campus in the springtime, and that they sleep in piles of ducklings (piles of ducklings! How cute of an image is that? I'll say it again: sleeping piles of ducklings), and I've been seeing adult ducks all over campus forever...so the appearance of these ducklings was just about the best thing I could have seen outside that window. Of course the next move was to stop doing homework entirely and go see the ducklings. We followed (maybe chased) them to the duck pond on campus, got hissed at by the mother, and got dive-bomb attacked by a male duck.

Even though we couldn't get too close, just seeing the little ducklings epitomized Easter. It was the coming of new life into the world. It was springtime after the death that was winter. It was Christ being raised from the dead so that we might have life. It was perfect.

I now need to find them when they're sleeping in a pile. Searching for sleeping piles of ducklings may or may not distract me from studying for my finals next week. We'll see.

And then I did more homework. :-) One week and one day until SUMMER!