Sunday morning I will wake up in my bedroom at my family’s home in Northwest Indiana.

My parents let me decorate my room myself in the seventh grade. I love my room because it’s happy. A photo-mural of cumulus clouds on a blue, blue sky dominates the main wall, so that my room looks sunny even when I wake up to an overcast day. The original plan included laying down astroturf to simulate green grass, but my mom nixed that idea.

In any case, let’s return to my original narrative. This weekend is Easter Sunday, which is why I’m going home.

Easter is a big to-do in my family. We will attend a very long and dressy church service Sunday morning. All of the relatives living nearby will amass at my aunt’s house to stuff themselves full of homemade bread, hardboiled eggs, ham and other “h” foods, such as horseradish and “ha-loo-ski,” the phonetic spelling of these boiled noodles my Polish family makes from leftover bread dough.

(***Contest alert: The first person who sends me the proper Polish spelling of this food will win a bag of after-Easter, reduced price black jelly beans! Good luck!)

Before I even get out of bed Sunday morning, though, the best part of Easter will have happened. Oh! The anticipation! I’m so excited just thinking about it that I can barely type this next sentence:

The Easter Bunny will have visited my house!

I can hear the skeptics out there. I know you. You’re just like Nathan Haholick, the evil little jerk in my kindergarten class who tried to convince me that Santa Claus wasn’t real.

To you Haholicks out there, I ask: “Would my parents eat half a raw carrot and nibble the lettuce leaf that my siblings and I leave out the night before? Would my parents leave white, powdery bunny footprints on my carpet? Would my parents be clever enough to hide an Easter egg in my dog’s food bowl?”

I think not.

Sadly, my mom says that the Easter Bunny stops visiting kids once they graduate from college. Really, that’s more than fair. The Big B. has to set a cut-off point somewhere. I mean, she doesn’t have the luxury of a flying sleigh or little elves.

At least I’ll always have the memories.

There was the time my siblings and I decided to give up on the last egg to allot more time to the strategic planning of our candy trading process. We didn’t find that egg until August, hidden in the curtain swag. Clever, clever Bunny.

Or the time my brother, Tony, and I accidentally found one another’s baskets, confused and disturbed as to why the Big B. gave me a Transformer and Tony a My Little Pony. (It occurs to me now that B. simply may have been asserting her feminism by screwing with established gender normative toys. Wise, wise Bunny.)

Remembering the good times occasionally makes it harder to face change, which I’ve been learning this year, my senior year.

Still, Sunday morning I’ll stare at my blue-sky wall and take a long, deep breath before I embark on my final hunt.

Thank goodness I had the sense to make my room a happy place in seventh grade. I think this Sunday’s predicted cloudiness would be too much to bear. nyou