Easter is over but somewhere out there, in the tall grass, under the forsythia, just inside the end of the downspout beside the back porch, wait dyed eggs which weren't found.

Maybe the Easter Bunny did the job too well or maybe the searchers weren't diligent enough. This year, in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania, there must have been quite a few Easter egg hunts carried out in blowing snow and temperatures near freezing. No one could be blamed for calling off the search a bit too soon.

The Easter morning egg rush was right up with Halloween Trick-or-Treating when my brother and I were kids. Our parents' and grandparents' big, contiguous yards dotted with gardens and trees provided a bewildering array of hiding places.

Not so bewildering that we didn't know to race straight to the big maple by the stone wall and squirm up into the fork formed by the three-way split in the trunk. That was a particularly good spot for a basket of candies too, as was the marble bench beside the holly bushes in the rock garden.

We'd scour all the predictable places -- beside tree trucks, on porch steps, by the corners of the houses and flower beds. Then we needed to slow down to find the eggs that were more cleverly concealed. Under an old flowerpot. Inside a watering can. Stuck far up in the latticework of the rose arbor or in the doorway of a birdhouse.

There was always an egg or two that eluded us. We came on them by accident during the summer. We would be looking for a stray baseball in the weeds at the edge of the lawn and there, behind a rock, would be an dyed egg, faded, cracked and hollow. An artifact from another era.

These eggs, displaced from their proper time, seemed quite remarkable to us. Magical. The past is not necessarily gone then, not truly consumed and beyond reach. Something we had thought lost forever might, just possibly, still remain to be found.