Yesterday, I let a most important day go by without even a mention: World Egg Day! Oh! I cringe in abject remorse! I had no idea.
However, now that I think about it, an egg is pretty important to the health and wealth of people in general and me, in particular. When I was a child on the farm, I doubt that I would have grown up so healthy without that flock of chickens Mom kept and those fragile brown eggs they offered up for our breakfast.
In fact, our hens were so intent on their jobs that we often sold our over-supply. So, hens and eggs were important to us for more than one reason.
Eggs sometimes are laid in surprising places, for instance, inside the pages of books. Yes, even within the pages of a mystery, there lies an egg. Have you read Laura Childs’ Cackleberry series?
Other egg books: The Bad Egg by Jessica Beck; The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg by James Anderson. Eggs have found their way even into books for children: Daniel’s Mystery Egg by Alma Flor Ada, Sherlock Chick and the Giant Egg Mystery by Robert M. Quackenbush and Mystery of the Hidden Egg by Elspeth Campbell Murphy. Let me hasten to admit I’ve not read any of these but you might want to take a peek and peer beneath the shell. I have, however, read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. And re-read and re-re-read.
In the fourth Darcy and Flora cozy which, by the way, now has a name: Grave Heritage, Flora has put eggs beneath one of her hens that Burke Hopkins gave her. She is expecting a new hatching of fluffy, yellow chicks soon. What will Jethro think of this addition to the family? Only time will tell.
I have always thought an egg is a pretty amazing thing. An unfertilized egg is nutritious but a fertilized egg is miraculous. There’s the hard, outer shell to give protection to what will grow within. From the yolk there will come a brand new life which mysteriously and wonderfully turns into an intricate living, breathing little chick with feathers, a beak, two legs and wings. Only God could have arranged such a thing.
But, have you ever hunted eggs in the lake like I have? One summer we had a flock of tame ducks, who enjoyed like on the lake and would lay their eggs just wherever they happened to be! So Steven and I spent a fair amount of time most days rowing the
boat around the shallow water in front of the house, hunting for duck eggs! Then we’d haul them in with a
net!
Missy, that’s a wonderful experience that not all children have! So, then did you eat the eggs or put them in an incubator and hatch them?
We ate ’em!!
Here hee! Were they yummy?