It was Palm Sunday, 1956.

My mother was baking a blueberry pie and her Aunt Lura was visiting. Lura was a sensitive sort, kindly and soft-spoken. She had never married.

As Mom, who was pregnant, placed the pie in the oven, she winced.

“Well, I guess it’s time to go,” she said.

“Go where?” Aunt Lura asked.

“To the hospital,” Mom replied. “It’s time.”

As Mom recounted years later, my great aunt disappeared so fast my mother never had a chance to wave good-bye.

“She didn’t want anything to do with babies being born,” Mom said, to which we all laughed.

I was born at 6:17 p.m. that day. While my six older siblings had been delivered at Maine Medical Center in Portland where my mother had trained to be a registered nurse and which she trusted implicitly, by the time it was my turn she figured it would be a piece of cake.

So she chose to have me at Sisters Hospital in Waterville, which was much closer to Norridgewock where we lived, than Portland.

“Tell me the story,” I asked her years later.

After arriving at Sisters Hospital, which now is Mount Saint Joseph, a care facility on Highwood Street, my mother lay on a gurney, she said, as a young nurse came into the otherwise empty room to check on her. My mother, calm as a cucumber, told her it was time. The young nurse didn’t agree, but said she’d fetch the doctor anyway.

Within minutes, my mother was peering up at the nurses and doctor who had arrived and were standing around, staring silently down at her.

“Well, what do you want me to do?” Mom asked.

“Push,” they said.

And out I came. According to Mom, it was a simple, perfect, painless, easy birth. One I don’t remember of course, but I was made to believe later that my birthday was special because Mom’s best friend, Rachel, also a nurse, had her youngest child, John, a week later, on Easter Sunday. Rachel loved that fact and reminded me of it every time we saw her.

When I was about 4, on my first day of Sunday school, a teacher asked me when I was born. Looking up at the kindly face of Jesus in a framed painting on the wall, I was tongue-tied.

“Well, last year my birthday was March 25, so maybe it is March 26 this year?” I said.

I’ve always liked the fact that I was born on Palm Sunday, which in later years, afforded me and my siblings the fortune of receiving large palm fronds at church. We brought them home and waved them around, pretending we were in Hawaii.

Holy Week was special. We got out of school early on Good Friday and went to church, where everyone was talking about Jesus dying and how it was a good thing, which I didn’t understand. I was even more mystified when two days later, on Easter, everyone said he’d risen from the dead.

Easter, though, was almost as good as Christmas. We flew downstairs early and searched for our Easter baskets which contained plastic grass, large chocolate bunnies and candy eggs.

We girls dressed in our pouffy, pastel-colored Easter dresses, bonnets, white ankle socks and gloves, patent leather shoes. My brothers donned suits and neckties. My mother was elegant in a form-fitting dress, hat and white gloves extending to her elbows.

We filed into church where white lilies flanked the altar, heard all about God rising from the dead and sang hymns. Besides the goodwill being shared all around, it was spring, and we were light-hearted.

We returned home where Dad had prepared Easter dinner, steam roiling up from pots on the stove, the scent of roasted lamb wafting through the kitchen. We dined on mashed potato, peas, carrots and turnip from our garden, and there were pies galore baked by my mother — typically lemon meringue, blueberry and coconut or banana cream.

The house was warm and we consumed to our hearts’ content, not yet understanding at our young ages, just how lucky we were.

Now, many decades and a world of experience later, we do. And we count our Easter blessings.

Amy Calder has been a Morning Sentinel reporter 37 years. Her columns appear here Sundays. She is the author of the book, “Comfort is an Old Barn,” a collection of her curated columns, published in 2023 by Islandport Press. She may be reached at [email protected]. For previous Reporting Aside columns, go to centralmaine.com.