My Easter Birthday

Easter 1951: Susan Nicklet, Mary (Lewis) Nicklet (mother), and Nancy Nicklet.
Photographed in all likelihood by Robert Nicklet (father).

Here I am in 1951--four years old. The back of the photograph says that it is Easter, and my sister Nancy and I are definitely looking at our Easter baskets from that year, though we don't seem overly impressed. Easter Sunday in 1951, I have just verified, fell on March 25, so I must have actually been four years old minus two days for this picture. I believe the photo must have been taken in the living room of our house on Chestnut Street in Sidney, Ohio, a house of which I have only a handful of real, lasting  memories, for we moved from that home to a new house on Campbell Road within a year or so. 

It was probably a few years later, when I became school age, that I learned that Easter was a movable holiday, dependent on natural forces and religious traditions that I did not understand. Easter did not come again in March until 1959, when it fell on March 29--two days after my birthday. Perhaps it was that year that I found a table that showed when Easter Sunday would fall for years in the future.  It was not as easy then as looking on the Internet. I wanted to find out if my birthday, March 27, would ever coincide with Easter Sunday in my lifetime.

Over the years I forgot the answer, because it wasn't going to happen for a long, long time. This year, Easter Sunday coincided with my birthday--for the first time, I thought--but when I went back to the Easter calendar, I discovered that it had happened once before, as recently as 2005. 

I have no recollection of the 2005 birthday and Easter. We were living in Spain then, in Roquetas de Mar. It was before I started writing my blog Sundays in Spain, and before I had found the handy-dandy Spanish agendas that I used as a datebook and diary (starting in 2006, I discovered to my chagrin when I went looking for them today). Perhaps this was the year that we went to some of the traditional Spanish Semana Santa observances in our small town, or maybe we took a bike ride along the seacoast to Aguadulce that day. At any rate, I am sure that "we" were just my husband and myself, none of my birth family.

Yesterday I was blessed to be in the heart of family; my three sisters and cousins Kathy and Katy and John all assembled at Nancy's for a lovely spring luncheon of quiche, hearty salads, eggs, angel food birthday cake and fruit, and a bunch of other extras, too. Nancy brought forth a handful of old family photos, mostly of her and myself. One was the print of the digitized photo above, now 65 years old. I remember that when as a child I first checked on Easter dates and learned when Easter would fall on my birthday, I had thought, "But I'll be an old lady by then!"

So I guess by my older standard I was an old lady yesterday, and am an even older one today! But I am not yet as old as I will be the next time Easter falls on my birthday: 2027. Now, there is a propitious year for a March 27 Easter birthday. And if I make it that far--I probably will be an old lady by then.