Hunting Eggs on the American Lawn

On an April Sunday the lawn is the one thing everybody has and the one thing nobody has finished. The grass is still barely up, a thin green fuzz over the heavy ground, with bald patches the color of sand where last year's leaves sat too long. The frost came out of the soil weeks ago, but the low spots squish underfoot, and the shadow side of the house keeps a paler green than the rest. A man in a windbreaker walks the mown rectangle in backward zigzags, dropping eggs out of a cardboard basket. The eggs are pink, blue, green, purple, and one gold. He tosses them underhand, easy, the way a gardener scatters seed, and he does not aim for the deep grass at the edge. That is for somebody else.

Behind a length of yellow plastic tape tied between a lawn chair and the leg of a picnic table, the children stand in rough rows by age, the oldest pushed to the front, the smallest hovered over by parents. There are a couple of dozen of them, in fleece jackets and church shoes and soccer cleats, and here and there a pastel dress that somebody has decided is worth the grass stains. Their breath shows in the cold air. The man with the basket steps off the grass, and a woman beside the tape raises her hand, and for a few seconds all of April is concentrated in the space between her hand coming down and the sound of those feet hitting the ground.

What follows looks like chaos, but it is one of the most reliable things April does. The egg hunt is a child's errand performed on the most adult surface in America. The lawn is mowed, edged, raked, limed, seeded, fertilized, watered, complained about, and apologized for through the whole spring. Then once a year it becomes a playground the size of a living room, and the thing the children find is not only the eggs but the yard itself — what it slopes toward, where it puddles, which corner never dries.

The stage is the argument

The American lawn is a recent institution and a demanding one. Before the postwar suburbs, the yard around a house was hedged, planted, or put to work — vegetables in the back, a few flower beds in the front, and packed dirt where there was no time for ornament. Then the tract houses went up, and with them the idea that a home sits in its own green field, visible from the street and read by every passing car. The lawn is the face a house shows the world, and the face has to be presentable. April is the month the face comes back from winter, and it is not pretty yet.

The first mowing of the year is its own ritual. The mower's pull cord comes out clean or not; the engine turns over and the blades begin to chew the winter's flattened brown. The grass is wet, and it lays down sideways under the cut, and the line is uneven, but the smell of it is the first true smell of spring anywhere in America. Then come the edges, the lime, the seed scattered over the bare patches and fenced off with string so nobody walks on it. That string is important, because the best grass in the yard is always the grass where the eggs will land.

The lawn is also a peace treaty among neighbors. The property line is invisible, but the mowing schedule is public knowledge. A lawn let go is a reproach to the whole block; a lawn overwatered is a statement of exactly how much one household cares. In April nobody has won yet, and so the lawns of an April Sunday are a ragged army — some shaved and striped like ball fields, some still gold with winter, some dotted with crocus and dandelion. The hunt does not care. It takes the grass as it finds it.

Washington has the same habit on the grandest scale. The White House Easter Egg Roll began on the South Lawn in 1878, and the tradition has outlasted wars and weather. There the republic's most watched lawn gets given over, on Easter Monday, to children and eggs and spoons — the front yard of the country doing what backyards everywhere do in the same week.

What the hunt finds in the grass

The egg hunt works because the lawn is small, open, and finished — a contained stage. Nobody worries that a child will wander into a hedge or fall into a brook, because the boundaries are a fence or a sidewalk and everything inside is mown and visible. That is the American version of a much older custom. The hunts of northern Europe happened in orchards and gardens, in the shaggy margins of great estates, half-hidden in hedgerows and under rosebushes. America did not inherit the hedgerow, and by the time the Easter egg hunt became a national habit it had the lawn instead. The two turned out to be made for each other: an open green where an egg can be hidden in plain sight.

Easter moves because the moon moves. It falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, which places it anywhere from late March to late April. A March Easter finds the lawn still mostly dead; the eggs lie on a brown field, and the children run with coats buttoned to the chin. An April Easter finds the lawn anywhere between first green and first mowing. A late Easter finds a warm block with the forsythia blazing, the grass tall at the edges, and the hunt run a minute ahead of the rain. The lawn is a different green every year, because the moon decides.

The hiding is done with care. The smallest children get their eggs in the open, where the lawn is flattest, which is also where the grass is most likely to be dry. Older children are expected to read the yard the way they will read a ball field or, later, a parking lot: eggs at the base of the downspout, beside the porch step, in the crook of the forsythia branch, half under the edge of the grill cover. Every hiding place is a feature of the lawn's architecture — the sprinkler head, the birdbath, the sunken rectangle where the swing set used to stand. The hunt is a map of the yard drawn in plastic.

The lawn, for its part, confesses everything. April grass is thin, and the ground beneath it is still soft from the thaw, so a child's full sprint leaves traces. The corner where the dog sleeps goes to dirt by June. The frost pocket at the bottom of the slope keeps the morning cold, and the eggs left there are the ones the parents quietly move. The mowed rectangle records every step, and by the time the last egg is found it is covered with the evidence of the hunt — the grass flattened in lanes, a few divots kicked up at the start, the shiny wrappers that somebody missed on the first pass.

After the last egg is found

Then the quiet. The children stand in the middle of the mowed rectangle, comparing cupped handfuls, trading green for yellow, opening the purple ones to see what is inside. The adults come onto the grass at last, moving slowly, gathering the dropped plastic and the stray foil and the one egg that split open when it hit the sprinkler head. The lawn, off-limits for an hour, is a lawn again. The person who scattered the eggs walks it one more time, kicking the grass to free a blue half-shell, bending once to pick a piece of candy out of the clippings.

The lawn keeps the evidence. Even the careful hunt misses the egg that bounced into the hostas, and in May the mower passes and the bag jumps with a white plastic fragment and a dusting of sugar. The wrappers turn up all summer, bright against the mulch. The gold egg surfaces in the car in June, under a seat, and the joke of it outlives the candy.

The tradition holds even as the lawns change hands. Not every hunt happens on a private yard now; many gather on the town common, the school field, the grass at the community center where the mower ran the day before. But the shape is the same: a boundary, an open green, eggs hidden at a reachable depth in the blades. Public or private, it is still the lawn — the American idea of a usable grass field, mown and tended and then, for one morning in April, overrun.

Next April it begins again. The frost comes out, the first mowing smells like the season turning, and somebody in a windbreaker walks the yard in backward zigzags, tossing eggs underhand. The grass heals from the running by Memorial Day. The lawn goes on being a lawn — mown, edged, worried over — until the next Sunday comes around, somewhere between the end of March and the end of April, and the children run onto it once more, and the green takes their weight.