Weekend Meanderings No. 104 | Easter Weekend, Egg Hunts and a Garden in Progress

Easter is the holiest weekend of the year for me — the one that quiets everything else down and asks you to pay attention

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Easter is the holiest weekend of the year for me and many others — the one that quiets everything else down and asks you to take a minute and to pay attention. Add a village egg hunt, a peony bed in crisis and three films I cannot wait to see, and it has been quite a week. Juliet, Kim and I have lots to share. Let’s meander.

We are heading to the village Easter egg hunt this afternoon, and I have been up since before Patches wandered out and decided it was time to investigate the back yard for 20 minutes in the dark. Sitting with my drinking chocolate and thinking about Easter mornings when I was small. There is something about this particular weekend that makes the past feel very close, and the ghosts and memories have been visiting me all week long.

My dad hid the eggs we colored with our Paas kit the night before — the baskets went inside, and weather permitting, the eggs went outside. We were allowed to find our baskets before church, but the eggs had to wait until after. I don’t miss the baskets, honestly. What I miss are the panorama sugar eggs my mother made every year. If you have never seen one, imagine a hollow sugar shell with a tiny diorama inside — a little world, a scene, a rabbit, a spring garden — glimpsed through a sugar-crystal window. My mother made them by hand, every Easter, for years. They were not the kind of thing you ate — although I will be honest, we did take a bite one year, and it was not very good. They were the kind of thing you held up to the light, looked into and imagined yourself frolicking with the rabbits.

Now when we want something handmade and beautiful for Easter, my mother sends chocolate from Hughes’ Home Maid Chocolates in Oshkosh, Wisconsin — a family-owned chocolate factory that has been operating out of the basement of a house since 1942. Handmade chocolate baskets and eggs filled with chocolate-covered caramels and assorted candy, made the same way they have always been made, by the same family, in the same place. There is something very special about that. It is not the same as a panorama egg, but it arrives with the same kind of love behind it, and that is part of the magic of the season.

Tomorrow we spend the day with family, which is the whole point of Easter weekend and possibly the whole point of most weekends.

The Garden, Honestly

I have been to the garden center and back again, which means I now have more plants than I know what to do with and some of them are going to have to go back. I have been desperately trying to find a place for a butterfly bush that will attract butterflies and hummingbirds but will grow six feet wide — there is no room for that. I am always honest with you about my limitations out there, and my limitations are real and they are many. Please send suggestions and help.

Here is the situation. After a tree fell on the house we are nervous — or maybe I am nervous — so we are having between seven and eleven trees cut down around the house, and three of them sit directly over one of my peony beds — the very bed where I had planned to put a number of companion plants this spring. I am not planting anything in that bed until those trees are down and the stumps are well and truly gone. We may end up relandscaping the entire area once it is all done, and I have made a kind of peace with possibly losing a bare root peony or two. The full grown peonies themselves will be fine — peonies always are, they are far more resilient than I am — and the rest will sort itself out in time. They will not bloom the first year they are replanted but at least I will have the front beds. Gardening teaches patience whether you sign up for that lesson or not, and humility. Thank goodness I am not growing my own food.

Films This Week

Three films on my radar this week, and they could not be more different from one another, which is exactly how I like it.

The Three Urns is the one I am most eager to see. After years living in France, Mr. O’Connor sets out on a pilgrimage back to his former home in Ireland following the death of his wife, and what unfolds is something equal parts road movie and quiet meditation — full of serendipitous encounters with a Lithuanian painter, an itinerant priest, horse traders, a Choctaw native commemorating the Great Famine, and a group of mystic women gathered at the ancient Beltany Stone Circle. Charming and joyful and often unexpectedly moving. It opens April 17th and I will be there.

The Gardener is the one that feels, to me, like it was made for every woman who has ever needed to step away from everything she has built in order to remember who she actually is underneath all of it. Sabena Weathers is fighting to save her family’s cosmetics empire from a hostile takeover, and she does the last thing anyone expects: she retreats to a remote mountaintop garden cottage, where a seemingly simple gardener named Walter takes her on a journey back to herself. It all begins in the garden, which feels exactly right. Coming spring 2026. P.S. I shared this before but I felt like it needed to be shared again. 

And then there is The Sheep Detectives, starring Hugh Jackman as a shepherd who reads detective novels aloud to his sheep every night — assuming, quite reasonably, that they cannot possibly understand a word of it. He assumes wrong. When a mysterious incident disrupts life on the farm, the sheep quietly take matters into their own hooves and prove that brilliant crime-solving is not exclusively a human enterprise. It is a witty, warm-hearted mystery and I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to it and to Emma Thompson as well. In theaters May 2026.

In Celebration of Easter

In honor of the weekend and one of the most celebrated rabbits in the world, two films on Beatrix Potter — who was not only a writer but a conservationist and a botanist, which I think most people forget entirely, if they ever knew it at all.

Beatrix Potter: The Secret Life of a Victorian Genius follows Patricia from London to Scotland and the Lake District, tracing what fired Beatrix’s imagination and where her deep understanding of the natural world first took root. The JK Rowling of her day, a Victorian publishing sensation who understood animals the way most of us understand our closest friends — and who, it turns out, had a great deal more to offer the world than picture books. The second is a short film from the V&A: Experience Beatrix Potter’s Lake District. When she died in 1943 she left fourteen farms and more than four thousand acres to the National Trust. That is not the biography of a woman who wrote charming picture books. If you have never been to the Lake District, put it on your list — it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever had the pleasure of visiting. And while you are there, go and visit Hill Top, her home.

One More Thing

A Twig Poet’s Rewinding Story is a short film about Swedish artist Maria Westerberg, who as a child found the forest — its gnarled twigs, its quiet, its particular kind of patience — when conventional life simply would not have her. She grew up to transform nature’s remnants into sculpture and poetry, and is now known as Sweden’s twig poet. This film follows her as she confronts a climate crisis that is slowly changing the very forest that once saved her. It is intimate and beautiful and the kind of thing you find yourself still thinking about the next morning over your first cup.

On My Radar

Before you go — what are your Easter traditions? Tell me in the comments. I always love to know.

Don’t forget to visit Juliet at Make Mine a Spritzer and Kim at Northern California Style — we always have lots to share.

One more thing, if you missed Dear Woman Who Has Been Last on Her Own List please take the time to read it. Pour yourself a cup of something warm or a cocktail, I promise it it worth the read. 

Have a blessed and beautiful Easter weekend, friends. I hope that you are surrounded by the love of family and friends and that the bunny brought you a few chocolates.

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Weekend Meanderings No. 103 | Gardens, Great Women and a New Monty Don.

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