Easter. Even if this isn’t how it happened, it’s how I remember it.

One year, my father was in charge of hiding the Easter eggs. He was only in charge of hiding the Easter eggs for one year, for a good reason. He’s a very clever guy. You don’t want clever when it comes to little kids and Easter eggs, you want eiditic memory, because if you don’t find all the eggs, there are eggs that are not found.

During the year in question (I must have been about eight) we found all the eggs but one. We looked for hours. We looked for days. Weeks passed. Months.

It was July.

The bedroom that I shared with my brother started to smell bad. I may have blamed my brother for the smell; I don’t remember. Mom yelled at us to clean our room. She yelled at us to clean it again. She finally cleaned it herself, but it didn’t do any good.

Until…

Convinced that some animal had crawled into the heater vents — or maybe even into the walls — and died, she moved my bed to the side to get to the heater vent in our room. Crunch! The smell got much, much worse. She looked under the bed…trapped between the frame and mattress was the last Easter egg.

Like I said, my father never got to hide the Easter eggs again.

There was also the time he bought us watermelon gum on a long car trip, but that’s a different story.