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My very first chore was gathering eggs. I was about three years old, living in the interior forests of New Brunswick, and I’d carry a basket to the chicken coop, carefully placing eggs within, listening to the cackling of triumphant hens squeezing out another breakfast for me.
Every day, I’d go out to the hen house, find the eggs, put them in the basket, and carry them back to the house. Though I was only a toddler, I only ever broke one.
One time, I saw a hen about to lay, and I thought I’d speed things up by putting my hand under her butt to catch the egg. This is how I learned that eggs don’t come out of birds with hard shells, but soft and malleable and covered in slime. The shells only harden once the air has had a chance to touch them all over and welcome them to the outside-of-a-chicken world. The hen didn’t mind my hand, but I did. I wiped it off on my pant legs and never put my hand beneath a cloaca again.
Dad told me of hunting for gull and puffin eggs on the cliffs of northern Newfoundland. Hard work, but he didn’t like the eggs because they tasted too much of fish. The orangey-red yolks are high in Omega-3 oils because those birds lived well on fish off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, a watery world once famous for so many cod you could toss a bucket off a ship and reel it in filled with fish. The fish were so numerous you could almost walk across them from Newfoundland to Mi'kma'ki. But then all the people of the world came to take the fish and soon there were almost none left. I suppose the gulls mostly eat garbage now. Do the eggs taste of old french fries and pizza crusts now?
When I was nine years old, my family packed up all our belongings and all our livestock to move to Musgrave Harbour, Newfoundland. My dad drove a school bus packed with a horse and a pony, our furniture, and the dog. Mom drove the big orange Chevy with us kids, and a camper filled with a few geese and one very mean goat. We were afraid the goat might hurt the geese, but when we stopped to check on them, the geese had laid an egg. The goat was backed into a corner, perched high up on the camper toilet, cowed by the rage of parental geese. We ended up living in a small house with no water and no power. The geese raised a family of goslings, and I paraded around the yard with them. They considered me part of the flock. Our new chickens lived inside the schoolbus, covering everything with their droppings, and I continued to collect the eggs.
In grade seven, I lived in the interior desert of British Columbia, nestled amongst the foothills to the Rockies. My nearest neighbour lived across the dusty sagebrush hills from us, overlooking the vast Kamloops Lake and the Thompson River. They raised araucana chickens. The eggs looked like Easter to me, a holiday I did not celebrate. But the pastel greens and blues and creamy white eggs tasted the same to me as the brown and white eggs of my childhood hens. My teacher gave the class the assignment to make a way to throw an egg off a school roof and land unbroken. I made a parachute for my egg, padded it well with wadded up tissue, and off it sailed from the roof to its doom. It cracked on asphalt and cooked under the desert sun. Good-bye, egg. You died for science. All the kids’ eggs died for science.
And then it was time to move back to the forests of New Brunswick, where once again, we had our own hens. Rhode island reds, barred rock, plymouth rock, and even meat kings ran free around our yard, and they all laid eggs. I no longer just gathered eggs. I wiped them off with damp cloths, cleaning off bird droppings. I candled the eggs with flashlights, setting aside any eggs with shadowy shapes within. We had little money, so my new task was to carry cartons of eggs to school to sell to my teachers.
School was a bad place. Although I was bullied throughout grade school, it reached its zenith in my teens. Egg days were the worst. Although I could heal from being punched, slapped, tripped, and abused, the eggs could not. I became a bodyguard for eggs. I was the secret service, diving in to take the bullets. Only once did I fail to protect the eggs, when my arms were held behind my back and someone threw the cartons on the floor of the schoolbus. I consider it a miracle that they didn’t all break. When I shamefacedly admitted to my parents that some of the eggs were broken, I was punished for my carelessness and sent back to school with an apology and a free carton for my teacher. I’m the only one who knew that delivering eggs to school was an act of wartime heroism. But even though the people at school didn’t like me, my chickens did. Some were every bit as excited as my dog when I got off the school bus, and everywhere I went in my yard, I was surrounded by animals who loved me.
Every day, I’d go out to the hen house, find the eggs, put them in the basket, and carry them back to the house. Though I was only a toddler, I only ever broke one.
One time, I saw a hen about to lay, and I thought I’d speed things up by putting my hand under her butt to catch the egg. This is how I learned that eggs don’t come out of birds with hard shells, but soft and malleable and covered in slime. The shells only harden once the air has had a chance to touch them all over and welcome them to the outside-of-a-chicken world. The hen didn’t mind my hand, but I did. I wiped it off on my pant legs and never put my hand beneath a cloaca again.
Dad told me of hunting for gull and puffin eggs on the cliffs of northern Newfoundland. Hard work, but he didn’t like the eggs because they tasted too much of fish. The orangey-red yolks are high in Omega-3 oils because those birds lived well on fish off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, a watery world once famous for so many cod you could toss a bucket off a ship and reel it in filled with fish. The fish were so numerous you could almost walk across them from Newfoundland to Mi'kma'ki. But then all the people of the world came to take the fish and soon there were almost none left. I suppose the gulls mostly eat garbage now. Do the eggs taste of old french fries and pizza crusts now?
When I was nine years old, my family packed up all our belongings and all our livestock to move to Musgrave Harbour, Newfoundland. My dad drove a school bus packed with a horse and a pony, our furniture, and the dog. Mom drove the big orange Chevy with us kids, and a camper filled with a few geese and one very mean goat. We were afraid the goat might hurt the geese, but when we stopped to check on them, the geese had laid an egg. The goat was backed into a corner, perched high up on the camper toilet, cowed by the rage of parental geese. We ended up living in a small house with no water and no power. The geese raised a family of goslings, and I paraded around the yard with them. They considered me part of the flock. Our new chickens lived inside the schoolbus, covering everything with their droppings, and I continued to collect the eggs.
In grade seven, I lived in the interior desert of British Columbia, nestled amongst the foothills to the Rockies. My nearest neighbour lived across the dusty sagebrush hills from us, overlooking the vast Kamloops Lake and the Thompson River. They raised araucana chickens. The eggs looked like Easter to me, a holiday I did not celebrate. But the pastel greens and blues and creamy white eggs tasted the same to me as the brown and white eggs of my childhood hens. My teacher gave the class the assignment to make a way to throw an egg off a school roof and land unbroken. I made a parachute for my egg, padded it well with wadded up tissue, and off it sailed from the roof to its doom. It cracked on asphalt and cooked under the desert sun. Good-bye, egg. You died for science. All the kids’ eggs died for science.
And then it was time to move back to the forests of New Brunswick, where once again, we had our own hens. Rhode island reds, barred rock, plymouth rock, and even meat kings ran free around our yard, and they all laid eggs. I no longer just gathered eggs. I wiped them off with damp cloths, cleaning off bird droppings. I candled the eggs with flashlights, setting aside any eggs with shadowy shapes within. We had little money, so my new task was to carry cartons of eggs to school to sell to my teachers.
School was a bad place. Although I was bullied throughout grade school, it reached its zenith in my teens. Egg days were the worst. Although I could heal from being punched, slapped, tripped, and abused, the eggs could not. I became a bodyguard for eggs. I was the secret service, diving in to take the bullets. Only once did I fail to protect the eggs, when my arms were held behind my back and someone threw the cartons on the floor of the schoolbus. I consider it a miracle that they didn’t all break. When I shamefacedly admitted to my parents that some of the eggs were broken, I was punished for my carelessness and sent back to school with an apology and a free carton for my teacher. I’m the only one who knew that delivering eggs to school was an act of wartime heroism. But even though the people at school didn’t like me, my chickens did. Some were every bit as excited as my dog when I got off the school bus, and everywhere I went in my yard, I was surrounded by animals who loved me.
