Before we were a city, we were a community. And like all communities, we would gather and celebrate from time to time. One of our favorite traditions was the annual Easter egg hunt at Lake Poway.
The day before the egg hunt, volunteers would hard boil and dye hundreds, maybe thousands of eggs. On the morning of the hunt, they hid them. They really hid them. They tucked them in and around the chapperal growing on the hillside next to the lake.
Mind you, this was not a dress-in-your-Easter-finery-and-new-patent-leather-shoes-and-make-a-mad-dash-for-plastic-eggs-that-someone-throws-out-on-a-circle-of-grass kind of egg hunt. Those are fun, too. But the Poway egg hunts were special. The kids really had to look hard for these eggs. And likely they had to do it on their own, because most of the parents were content to watch from the base of the hill.
I did worry about the kids finding a rattlesnake or two hiding among the eggs. But a friend of mine assured me that no self-respecting rattler would venture out when the fury started. And, as far as I know, no one was ever bit.
Looking at these old pictures also reminds me that even in seasonless Southern California, we did have variable Easter weather. Looks like that cold Easter was a drought year, too.
