Published: March 28, 2008 10:27 am      

Times Easter egg found in Glenwood Park

PRINCETON — It was a dirty job, but Taresa Horne and her children, Charles and Tara Sparks, did it. They found the Princeton Times Easter Egg in Glenwood Park Monday.

Ironically, Horne, of Rock, found the egg under a rock beside the Calfee-Wall cabin near the entrance to the park.

Wet weather and two weeks in hiding were hard on the treasure. The egg was split, with a few tiny slugs and worms crawling inside with the $500 certificate.

The critters didn’t bother the happy hunters much. Tara, 9, called the worm remaining in the egg “our lucky worm inside.”

Horne said she and her family were praying while they searched for the egg.

“When we found it, we yelled, ‘Thank you Jesus.’ People were looking at us funny,” she said.

The family started searching last Saturday and looked for more than two hours.

“I knew it was there,” Horne said. “I woke them up Saturday morning and had them get going. We walked our legs off.”

Tara helped her mom search for the egg, but got worried when they couldn’t find it.

“I thought a bird had carried it away or something,” she said.

Horne, who works at the L & M Market in Lashmeet, said her husband helped hunt Saturday. Though they flipped the rocks near the Wall house, they didn’t locate the egg on that trip.

Charles, 12, said he enjoyed looking through the Wall house.

Horne and her helpful treasure hunters were still planning what to do with the $500 prize that was verified by the notarized certificate inside the plastic egg.

Horne said she planned to pay bills with her part of the money, but she planned to give her children some of the $500 to spend.

“I’m going to get a hamburger,” Charles said of his share.

“He’ll probably get a game for his PlayStation,” Horne said.

Tara said she wanted to get a guinea pig or a hamster. Her mom said the 9-year-old would probably go toward Hannah Montana items too.

Horne said the six published clues all added up for her to find the egg.

“One clue said ‘Time for a treat?’ I knew that was Twistee Treat. Another said ‘See 20/20.’ That’s Route 20. ‘If these walls could talk,’ went with the name of the house. ‘View the state’ went with the big flower garden in the park in the shape of the state. They all went together,” she said.

Times General Manager Tammie Toler explained the only two clues Horne didn’t detail.

“One of the first clues we ran said something to the effect of, ‘Look high. Search low. Round and round we go.’ That was a reference to the playground at the park, where kids of all ages swing high and low and circle round and round on a spiral slide,” she said. “Another of the clues declared, ‘My shade’s all the envy.’ A lot of this year’s egg hunters believed that clue had something to do with a tree and its shade from the sun. Really, it was just a reference to the color of the egg. We hid a green egg, and that color typically represents jealousy or envy.”

When the family went to search Glenwood Park Monday, they found the egg in 15 minutes. “We look about every year if there’s an egg to be found with the Princeton Times. We’ve looked for the Bluefield Daily Telegraph eggs as well,” Horne said.

She said family members cut out the clues for the egg every year and then put them together on a piece of paper so everyone can help.

“It’s a family tradition,” she said.

— Contact Mark Blevins at mblevins@ptonline.net.