Happy Easter
I can remember being very excited as Easter time came around. We would dye a few eggs and the big kids would hide them .....over and over! One year when I was about 8 it was different, though. Mama very enthusiastically showed us how to make Easter egg nests with sticks of freshly split stove wood. We stacked them up like little log houses...two one way, two across the ends...then on up about a foot or two tall. They stood everywhere around the woodpile. We put lots of soft grass in the bottoms for Mr Bunny to put our eggs on. I mean we spent a LOT of time on those long waiting days ....checking on them in case he came early ..comparing to see who had built the best ones....adding more
soft grass.

On Easter morning there were pretty eggs in the 'rabbit nests'.....AND the stove wood had dried out nicely, all separated apart into stacks to let the Spring breezes flow through. That Mama had tricked us again!  *grin*

Taking down the Stove
One thing I remember when I was growing near Dresden was that the heating stove had to be toted out to the shed and we'd have to depend on the cook stove for heat on those chilly mornings during Redbud and Blackberry winters. Mama would get tired of us clustering around the cook stove when we got up to go to school and grumble, but Daddy would just laugh and tell her she was the one that made him go to all that trouble of taking it down when he really did need to spend every spare minute in the fields. You see,with our big family we needed all the space we could get, so in the Spring the heating stove was banished from the living room....In the Fall the chore was reversed. Menfolks put this onerous task off as long as  they could because it always turned into a major deal.. In the first place the stove weighed about 'a ton', and was very awkward to tote. Anybody big enough to help seemed to mysteriously disappear when it got down to the nitty gritty. Ashes were scattered everywhere no matter how much trouble Mom took, and a piece of
pipe was sure to fall and loose a shower of soot...and a mumbled curse or two from my fun loving Dad.