“You can make pear-bunny salads,” my friend told me as the foodie group divvied up the dishes to be prepared for this year’s extravagant Easter dinner. My culinary skills being mostly on the unpredictable side, I usually provide the salad.
“Pear-bunny?” I asked, contorting my mouth and nose.
“Yeah, with puffs of cottage cheese for their tails,” she replied.

When I googled “bunny rabbit pear salad,” I found pictures and recipes from all over the US and Canada. People reminisced about their grandmas sticking raisin-eyes and red-hot candy noses into canned pears plopped onto beds of iceberg.

It brought me back to more than half a century ago, when my father’s secretary sent home Easter baskets for his poor little deprived Jewish girls. I was captivated by the jellybeans and chocolate bunnies wrapped in pink and yellow ribbons. And then there was another gift, a box of carved lamb-soaps nestled in green shredded-paper grass that I carried from bed to breakfast to backyard, lovingly adding bits of dandelion so the sheep shouldn’t go hungry.

I remembered Richard Scarry storybooks with sweet rabbits of every rabbit-color sprawled out in strawberry patches. Some were spotted, and that brought me to thinking about Fuzzy, my first stuffed dog, and then Salty the schnauzer puppy my sister and I used to dress in doll clothes. Then I thought of how decades later, I made big beautiful Easter baskets for my own kids, filled with books and tiny toys as well as candy; and how we’d curl up with our own real rabbits, feeding them the packets of carrots and kale we’d prepared. Life was so pretty. Simple. Innocent. Oh, so deliciously cuddly and cute.

This was where my head was today when I found among my emails, a Facebook message from a stranger, “My offer still stands. When you’re ready.” The cover photo showed an unknown bearded man on a motorcycle. Upon checking his Facebook page to see if he might possibly be one of my old hiking buddies, I discovered multiple pictures of furry naked men, and was reminded that all that’s fuzzy is not necessarily an adorable Easter bunny.

So, what pretty sweet things are you thinking of as we approach the Easter and Passover holidays? Can you guess what I used on the pear-bunny to make the eyes, ears, and nose?