March 20, 2008

I woke up thinking about eggs. While the kids were dyeing yesterday I was in the kitchen blowing out 18 eggs. The kids watched me about 10 seconds. Henry said "that's like watching a birth." And Riley just said, "Ewwwwwwwwwwwwww!" Don't you think its fascinating or appropriate or something, that Henry was reminded of birth? I took a straight pin and put three tiny holes in the top of an egg. Right now, I realise how much that seems like a mouth and two nostrils. Then one slightly bigger (skewer sized, in fact) hole in the bottom. Then I scrunched up my mouth and pushed like hell. Yep. And the yolk coming out the other end? HUGE. Yep. That about sums up the process.

If I hadn't grown up and started keeping chickens I never would have noticed that hens slack off in the winter. Then in spring, egg production picks up again. Of course, eggs are the perfect symbol of new life. The seed. A farm product. What women make. A cyclical event. About the best protein available. Spring time return. Yellow sun. A safe with no lock. Single cell where all of life began, and is risen again and again. I ask you, what didn't the Pagans see? God love 'em.

Its about creativity, naturally. And I have this bowl of clean white egg shells, perfect. The ultimate canvas, it seems to me. I have a mysterious urge, as with those little owls from last fall, to fill up bowls of eggs around my house. I want to cut up tiny bits of fabric in bright colors and glue them all over my eggs. I want to make a hundred black and white prints from my Holga camera and glue teeny tiny pictures of my children all over eggs. Thinking of Lori and Becky, I want to photo copy books and poems and song lyrics, written by people I love, and cut out eensy weensy strips of words and glue them all over eggs. I want to figure out a way to felt wool over an egg shell. I want to do very dramatic things with tissue paper, not limited to scrunching up many tiny scrunchy flowers and gluing them, all fuzzy ends out, all over my eggs. A fur covered egg? Yes. Oh, we can reverse the whole thing and felt an egg shape and then cover that with shell. How hard would it be to illuminate an egg from the inside - tiny lights.

As with the owls from last fall, these things may or may not happen. But the thrill of possibility seems to capture the season perfectly. The eggs, white there in their bowl, sum it all up quite nicely.

1 comment:

candyn said...

Oh wow, you have me obsessing about decorating eggs now. Thank you. It is one of those things that I don't treasure doing for whatever reason and the time is here. I guess I wasn't seeing the true possibilities. (And what cool possibilities you've come up with!)

Do you blow out the eggs for the kids decorate? If so do they become more fragile to handle than hardboiled?