Jan Goldyn, Author

I can remember the damp smell of earth and moss as my grandmother and I entered the path through the early spring woods. My grandma wore a pair of rolled up jeans, a duster apron covered in flowers and a red bandana around her head, which we called a “babushka,” a name taken from Grandma’s Polish background.

Back in those days, you would see many “babushka ladies” — working in their yards, cooking amazing things in church kitchens, being dropped off by their grandsons or daughters at corner stores while their loved ones waited in the car. I didn’t know then how much I would one day miss those ladies.

As my grandmother walked ahead of me in the woods, the sound of robins and the mottled light coming through the newly budded leaves sparked a sort of thrill in me. The world was coming back to life!

My grandma stopped. “Here it is.” She took a small saw and cut a thorny branch from a Hawthorne bush. Our jelly bean tree! I was always amazed that her hands, toughened by years of outside work, didn’t seem to react to thorns, bark, cuts, scrapes.

In her youth, some of Grandma’s German friends in this new world had shown her the custom of jelly bean trees — boughs placed in a pot or vase, their thorns decorated with jelly beans, their branches hung with painted, hollowed-out eggs and miniature bunnies, peeps, flowers and birds. Magic!

Each year I try to re-create this Easter enchantment. I still walk to the same patch of woods where my grandma led me so many years ago to gather a thorny branch. The woodsy smell and the robins’ songs create a thrill once again. Though my grandma and her babushka are no longer there, I’m sure I hear her voice before I reach the Hawthorne, “There it is.”