Owning it.

           Down route 214 from our neighborhood, and across from Lou’s Country Store, where the residents of communities within a mile’s radius get their liquor and Cheetoes, are a number of small businesses.  South River Flooring is in a trailer on a gravel lot.  Watercheck inhabits half of a one story brick office.  The other half rents back hoes.  Next to Watercheck is a shabby red brick house on a quarter acre.  Although I drive by at least twice a day, I have not been able to discern the structure of the family that lives there.  Sometimes there is an old man smoking a cigarette on the porch.  Sometimes there is a punk ass teenager smoking in the yard, preparing to jay walk to Lou’s.  The brick house is one of a line of run down eyesores along Central Avenue.  While the neighborhoods branching off Central Avenue offer homes at a variety of prices, from modest ranch houses, to luxury estates on Cadle Creek and the Rhode River, the houses right along 214 are uniformly decaying.  Many were farm houses before Edgewater became a Baltimore and DC bedroom community, and before 214 evolved from a country road to a two lane thoroughfare. 

            The first year we lived in Edgewater, the red brick house did not decorate for Easter.  Decorating for Easter is not much of a tradition, but some of our neighbors would put an inflatable bunny in the yard, or fly a flag with a purple crocus on it.  There are sometimes one or two “He is Risen” signs.  Easter isn’t a decorating holiday.

            The following year, the red brick house was decked out in inflatable bunnies.  There must have been a hundred bunnies, in pink and blue and yellow, hanging from the trees like Christmas ornaments, and stuck into the ground.  It looked like an amusement park.  In addition to the bunnies, there were at least fifty inflatable Easter eggs of various sizes.  I thought it was curious that someone would put so much effort into decorating for Easter.

            Our neighbor, who knows everything, told us that it was a prank.  I thought it was a funny prank, and wondered if it was friends of the teenage punk, or just a random act of pastel.

            Then, the following year, the bunnies reappeared.  Who is the phantom prankster who covers this house with bunnies?  Is this the same person who puts a rose and a bottle of liquor on Edgar Allen Poe’s grave?  I have another theory.  The infestation of inflatable bunnies started out as a prank.  The brick house found it so cheerful, that it decided to continue the tradition on its own.  Now, the bunnies sprout every year around Easter, just like the tulips.