My mama was artsy-craftsy, but all of her God-given talent was inherited by my sister Kathy. I am so art challenged that I used to show up at my Sunday school class, throw out some Ritz Bits, and tell the kiddos to wake me up in forty-five minutes. I would love teaching Sunday school except for the crafts part. For a long time, I tried to hide my secret: the other teachers are the kinds of women who save Pringles canisters and paper towel tubes “just because.” I’m not sure, but I think they even keep arthritic chicken bones in their freezers for possible centerpiece projects. Our Presbyterian Church has a Helping Hands group that makes quilts for graduating seniors and lap robes for shut-ins. After Lanny broke his leg, he received a beautiful lap robe from the Helping Hands group. After he healed up and haired over, the tug-o-war began between him and me.
Sunday school teachers are almost always crafty, and I am convinced that heaven will be filled with their handiwork, including the woven-ribbon Bible bookmarks I can’t make. Unlike them, I do not own my own monogrammed, double-action, chrome-handled glue gun. I have listened to other teachers chat about crafts they’ve been working on. There have been bubbly descriptions of the Easter banner for the church sanctuary, exciting chatter about handmade Easter bracelets, and jubilant talk of sugar spun Easter baskets. Yawn. All my taste is in my mouth.
I knew the crafts thing was going to be a problem when my task was to “build an Easter diorama.” Huh? It might as well have been “Define the universe; give two examples.” I had no idea what a diorama was, let alone how to build one. Over the years there have been plenty more scares (I still have trouble talking about the exploding Baby Moses basket in the microwave, although his head was still edible).
The one thing I have mastered is how to glue tissue paper to baby food jars so that they look like stained-glass windows. Okay, actually, it just looks like tissue paper on a baby-food jar, but have a little faith, would you? It took a lot of strained peas disguised in Lanny’s beef pot pie just to have enough jars.
Speaking of food, my mama made the best deviled eggs. She called them stuffed eggs at Easter time because she insisted on snubbing the devil during Holy Week. As a child, the smell of deviled eggs at any other time of the year meant somebody had died. Whenever I saw Mama get down the egg plate, I might well have asked, “Who died?”
I loved my mama’s paprika-sprinkled deviled eggs so much that it almost made me look forward to funerals.
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Crow's-Feet Chronicles - My craft lays an egg
Apr 5, 2026
